I joined Lyra Health as the sole designer at Series B. I solved a core trust problem driving user drop-off, creative directed a company rebrand, scaled the team, and built Lyra's first design system. Lyra has since become the category leader, valued at over $4.5 billion.
Lyra's entire value was matching employees with evidence-based therapists — but users were abandoning their provider recommendations. The product did almost nothing to communicate why these providers were recommended or what made Lyra's curation different from a Google search. The science behind the matching was Lyra's greatest competitive advantage, and the product was hiding it.
Underneath this was a broader problem: no design system, no brand language, no research practice, and a fragmented end-to-end experience where significant parts of the user journey happened through inconsistent automated emails — reaching people at their most vulnerable moments.
I led qualitative user research that revealed care seekers weren't rejecting providers — they were rejecting the lack of explanation. I redesigned two critical decision points: choosing a care path (adding contextual framing connecting recommendations to clinical evidence) and choosing a provider (creating "Lyra Recommended" badging and an explanatory modal showing why providers were curated, not just listed).
I mapped the full care seeker journey and discovered fragmented email communications — some from a marketing tool, others hard-coded by engineers — with no consistent voice or content strategy. I worked with marketing and the clinical team to create a unified content framework appropriate for the sensitivity of the context.
The existing "brand" was a set of colors pulled from the original engineering UI. I creative directed a full rebrand with an external agency, establishing a visual identity that communicated clinical credibility and warmth — the trust infrastructure that every other design decision depended on.
I hired a full-time UX designer for the provider experience, introduced user research as a practice, secured budget for a UX-focused engineering contractor, and together built Lyra's first responsive component library — directly increasing the speed and quality of shipped product.
Care navigators reported a significant drop in users requesting alternative providers. Users began booking directly with their Lyra-recommended match.
"I haven't gotten requests for more providers in quite a while. When I hear from people, I'm getting more who say things like 'I've already booked with my Lyra recommended provider.'"
— Kristi, Care Navigator Team Lead"I hope we can do more sessions like that. It was great to see your leadership and everyone's engagement."
— David Ebersman, CEO, Lyra HealthThe team, research practice, design system, brand, and content strategy I built became the foundation Lyra scaled on — from Series B to category leader serving millions of employees at companies including Morgan Stanley, eBay, and Zoom.