Designing for Vulnerability: Building a Behavioral Health App That People Actually Trust
Product: KindBridge Native Behavioral Health App
Company: KindBridge Behavioral Health
Role: Product & UX Strategy Lead
Business Context
KindBridge operates at the intersection of behavioral health and regulated industries. As partnerships with MGM and DraftKings grew, the company identified the need for direct, user-facing support for individuals struggling with gambling addiction.
This required building a net-new native mobile product—driven by enterprise partnerships, regulatory responsibility, and market timing, not simply a UI initiative.
What Existed Before
KindBridge primarily served enterprise and clinical partners, with support for individuals handled indirectly or through fragmented, high-friction experiences. Existing product patterns weren’t suitable for a consumer-facing, emotionally sensitive native app without risking disengagement or mistrust.
The Strategic Question
The real question was not “What should this app include?”
rather
How do we design a digital experience that people with addiction will actually trust, return to, and use during moments of vulnerability?
Key constraints included:
High emotional and ethical responsibility
Regulatory and enterprise partner expectations
Need for rapid clarity to support development handoff
Before
Initial assumptions leaned toward a traditional behavioral health app model—education, tracking, resources, and support tools—based on industry norms.
Reframing the problem
Through strategy alignment and UX exploration, it became clear that:
Users struggling with gambling addiction are highly sensitive to tone, judgment, and friction
Overly clinical or generic wellness patterns increase drop-off
Trust, privacy, and emotional safety mattered more than feature density
The Shift
Create a non-judgmental, supportive system that helps users interrupt destructive cycles
Strategic Direction
We aligned on a strategy focused on breaking the addiction cycle through small, supportive interventions, reducing shame and cognitive overload, and designing for moments of relapse—not just success—defining what the product needed to be before any UI work began.
The Result
A product that supports individuals struggling with gambling addiction through a supportive, judgment-free native experience that balances clinical credibility with human-centered design, while aligning with KindBridge’s enterprise partnerships and behavioral health mission.
Outcome & Impact
As a result, KindBridge launched a dedicated native app supporting partners like MGM and DraftKings, establishing a direct behavioral health touchpoint with end users and giving internal teams a scalable foundation for future growth—strengthening both user outcomes and partner trust.
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