Valera Health is an online mental health service provider, working with mental health professionals and insurance companies to bring excellent psychiatry, psychology, and care management services to those who need them most.
I joined the company as a primary designer, and as the business scaled over time transitioned to a Lead designer role.
How can a good design system support a sense of trust?
An inconsistent visual look can lead patients to doubt the service provider’s reliability or credibility. In a market like healthcare, especially in the mental healthcare field, creating a trust relationship is key to achieving better, more engaged care.
When I learned that we are about to scale our operation and add more products, creating a consistent design system was not only about establishing trust with patients, but also about being able to deliver new features quickly and efficiently.
Developing the visual language
Images showing the different visual languages used in the app, web-app, website and communications.
We aimed for a clean, bright look that imitates paper but keeps it proffesional and intresting.
We swent through a process of refreshing the brand, focusing on a few main pillars:
- Diverse/inclusive
- Personalised/Curated
- Reliable/Stable
- Accesible/convinient
- Humanly flawed/Communicative
We fleshed out our vision by expiramenting with different ideas. We conducted short expirament sessions, focusing on high-visual and low content outputs such as web-homepages or instagram posts, trying to capture those values in a visual way.
The basis of the visual language are the toned, warm-ish background colors and bright blues. we used highlighter-adjacent accents and lively illustrations to inject some fun where we can.
We couples those with humanistic fonts, making sure they are easily readable in all sizes and available in our targert languages.
The design System
Since we had to convert a lot of existing screens, across multiple platforms while maintaining accesibility and responsiveness, we decided to start with the MUI library as a starting point.
As we moved on, I created a “patterns library” for use of non-designers at the company, allowing for easy communication and reusing existing compound components.
This allowed us to work quickly and cohesively, converting the 3 existing product to the new design, while supporting the design of a whole new product.
