Role: Lead Experience Designer Company: AbleTo
The misalignment
AbleTo was selling therapy services for depression and anxiety to people who hadn't been clinically diagnosed with either. The marketing was framed entirely the wrong way — and as a startup that wasn't yet profitable, the cost of that mismatch compounded month over month.
The deeper question wasn't "how do we sell better?" It was "what does the customer actually need, and what are we actually offering them?"
Research
Working between the marketing and product teams, I led a research effort across two fronts:
- Literature review — Deep dives through PubMed and JAMA on the lived experience of patients with chronic conditions: diabetes, GI disease, chronic pain. What did their day-to-day actually feel like? What were they trying to manage?
- Frameworks — Synthesized models of health communication, persuasion, and behavior change to understand how patients with chronic conditions made decisions about their care.
- Original user research — Direct interviews with the target population to validate (and frequently overturn) what the literature suggested.
From this, I built a service blueprint of the existing customer experience and a map of the critical moments of truth — the points where patients were most receptive to a different message.
The repositioning
The product itself didn't need to change. The framing did.
Patients with chronic physical conditions weren't looking for therapy. They were looking for relief from the secondary symptoms of those conditions — the anxiety of unpredictable flare-ups, the depression that comes from chronic pain, the cognitive load of constant management. AbleTo's MBCT and MBSR programs were genuinely effective at addressing these symptoms — but the marketing was pointing at a different door entirely.
I redesigned the marketing experience and product positioning around symptom relief for primary chronic conditions, not mental health treatment.
Outcome
A single redesigned landing page, built around the new positioning, generated $5M in additional revenue for the company.
The lesson was about discipline more than design: the work that mattered most was the research that uncovered the misalignment. The design execution was important, but it was a multiplier on a strategic decision that had already been made correctly.