Designing trust in digital mental health

Background

Pinga connects patients with its own vetted, licensed psychologists via chat and video — no waitlist, no commute, at roughly half the cost of traditional therapy.

When I joined, the platform already existed. People could register, chat, book sessions. But something wasn't working — users hesitated, dropped during registration, and weren't sure what they were paying for. In mental health, hesitation means leaving.

For 2.5 years as the sole product designer, I covered the full product: landing page, patient platform, psychologist workspace, corporate role, and admin analytics dashboard.

The Challenge

The product was asking for commitment before earning trust.

• Long, friction-heavy onboarding — users dropped before seeing any value
• Confusing subscription model — unclear limits, hidden cancellation, too many plan tiers
• No emotional safety — transactional tone in a deeply sensitive domain
• No foundation to build on — no design system, no source files, legacy code, bilingual complexity (DE/EN)

Process

✶ Built the foundation from scratch. No source files, no components. I reverse-engineered the live product and built a full design system from zero, covering web and mobile (Flutter), localised for both German and English.

✶ Read the metrics instead of running formal research. With no dedicated research time, I worked with heuristic analysis, competitive benchmarking, and close collaboration with the PM and business analysts to understand where users dropped off and why.

✶ Advocated for users in every sprint. Without a researcher, I flagged dark patterns, pushed back on pressure-driven decisions, and consistently argued for trust over conversion — especially critical in a mental health context.

✶ I tracked the full journey and targeted each friction point in turn: Visitor → Registration → Trial → Payment → First Chat → Ongoing Sessions → Retention.

Solutions

✶ Redesigned onboarding around emotional safety. Shifted the experience from “sign up and commit” to “start safely and explore.” Reduced required fields, added an immediate value moment (a short wellbeing check-in leading to psychologist matching), introduced Anonymous Mode, and surfaced trial and cancellation logic upfront.

✶ Made trust a structural principle, not a visual detail. Rewrote plan comparison logic, clarified usage limits, simplified cancellation, and shifted the tone across all key decision screens to be calmer, clearer, more human.

✶ Strengthened retention between sessions. Retention happens between therapy sessions, not during them. For patients: audio messages, file attachments, session scheduling, therapist-assigned exercises (relaxation, reflection, meditation). For psychologists: private notes, session planning tools, reusable welcome templates, welcome video.

Results

• ✶Product live at pinga.app across Germany and Austria
• ✶5 platforms designed end-to-end as a solo designer
• ✶Lower-friction onboarding — clearer entry, faster path to the first psychologist conversation
• ✶Transparent subscription logic — simplified plans, visible limits, honest cancellation flow
• ✶Richer therapist–patient interaction — from a chat tool to an ongoing support environment
• ✶Scalable design foundation built from scratch across web, mobile, and two languages

Reflection

In a sensitive domain, clarity drives growth. Trust isn't a visual detail — it's a retention strategy.

The hardest conversations on this project weren't about layouts. They were about whether to make cancellation easy, whether to show the real limits of a plan, whether a person in distress should have to give their name before they get any help. Every time we chose transparency, the product got slower to convert and better at keeping people.