Redesigning Take Therapy's onboarding from 7 steps to 3
A 6-week end-to-end UX redesign of Take Therapy's mobile booking flow.

The TL;DR.
The business problem before the design problem.
Take Therapy is a digital therapy platform serving ~50,000 monthly active users across the US and UK, matching clients with licensed therapists for video sessions. They'd hit product-market fit; their growth was acquisition-led but unit economics were getting worse — CAC was up 34% YoY while activation lagged.
The CMO and Head of Product agreed: we have to fix activation before we spend more on top-of-funnel. The team's hypothesis was that onboarding was too long. I was brought in to validate that hypothesis with real research, redesign the flow, and ship within 6 weeks before the next paid-acquisition push.
What I owned, and who I worked with.
- Owned:Research methodology, interview synthesis, IA, all visual + interaction design, design system contributions, usability testing, dev handoff.
- Co-owned with PM:Problem framing, success metrics definition, scope decisions, sprint planning.
- Influenced:Clinical safety review, copy, post-launch experimentation roadmap.
- Not in scope:Therapist-side dashboard, billing logic, anything outside the booking flow.
Six weeks, four phases, Double Diamond.
14 interviews, analytics review, support ticket synthesis.
4 competitors mapped on onboarding speed + friction.
Problem reframed, principles set, sitemap rewritten.
3 concepts explored, 1 chosen for high-fi.
Final designs, 4 new tokens, 6 reusable components.
Moderated UT with 8 users, 2 iterations, dev handoff.
Three insights that reframed the problem.
The team's hypothesis was "onboarding is too long." Research surfaced something more specific: it wasn't length, it was asking the wrong things at the wrong time.
5.1 Methodology
- Participants 14
- Recruited via support email + UserTesting
- Criteria first 7 days post-signup
- Format 30-min remote (Zoom)
- Synthesis Affinity diagram, 6 themes
- Drop-off funnel (Mixpanel) 90 days
- Support tickets reviewed 340
- Session recordings (Hotjar) 52
- Existing NPS responses ~600
- Insurance set-up rate baseline 41%
5.2 Primary personas
"I just want to talk to someone today. Why are you asking me about my deductible?"
"I already filled all this out last time. Why does it forget who I am?"
5.3 Current-state journey map · Sarah
5.4 Competitive audit
From insight to a How Might We.
6.1 Design principles
Get them to a session. Optimise the profile later.
Defer every question that isn't needed for clinical safety or the booking transaction.
Pre-filled tappable options beat blank fields. Every screen has fewer than 3 decisions.
6.2 Success metrics — defined upfront
6.3 Information architecture · before → after
Three concepts, one shipped.
7.1 Iteration timeline · the "Concern Picker" screen
Killed: Users froze. Open text was the wrong cognitive load.
Killed: Too many choices. Decision paralysis.
Shipped: 6 distinct concerns covering 92% of intents. Visual cues reduce read time.
What I added to the system.
The redesign didn't ship as one-offs. Every new pattern became a reusable component in Take Therapy's Figma library, used by 4 squads after this.
The shipped flow, screen by screen.
Distilled from 12 in usability testing. Covers 92% of first-session intents.
Required for clinical safety routing, so the chip system has to be the right fidelity.
Always visible. Reduces uncertainty about "what is next?"
Eight users. Three scenarios.
Moderated remote testing via Maze + Zoom. Two iterations during the test week — the concern picker dropped from 12 chips to 6 after session 4 when participants kept missing what they actually wanted.
- Book your first therapy session, paying out-of-pocket.8 / 8
- Reschedule that session for next week.7 / 8
- Add your insurance after the fact.6 / 8
WCAG 2.2 AA, end-to-end.
Mental health products carry a duty to be reachable by everyone. Every screen of the new flow passed automated (axe-core) and manual (VoiceOver + TalkBack + Keyboard) audits before merge.
What shipped, and what changed.
"Masfa took our most frustrating user flow and made it the part of the app we are proudest of. She does not just deliver screens — she ships product thinking."
What I would do differently next time.
- Defining success metrics in week 3 (not week 6) — let me self-validate decisions without escalating to PM.
- Running usability tests during design week, not after — caught the chip overload before it shipped.
- Pairing with the clinical director early — got safety-required questions deferrable without re-litigating in week 5.
- Recruit testers for week 1 — I scrambled in week 5. Should have run a 5-person pre-test in week 2.
- Bring engineering into research synthesis. Bilal's 'we can pre-compute insurance verification' comment in week 5 would have been worth a week earlier.
- Design the 'what to test next' backlog as part of handoff — left it implicit, not explicit.
13.1 Acknowledgments
Big thanks to Ayesha for ruthless scoping, Bilal & Daniel for engineering pragmatism that shaped what was actually shippable in 6 weeks, and Dr. Sara for review that turned "fast" into "fast and safe." None of this ships without the team.
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