WeLysn

Mental health and EAP platform, rebuilt from the ground up while pivoting from consumer therapy to enterprise care.

problem

We Lysn was rebuilding its platform from the ground up while pivoting from consumer therapy to enterprise employee assistance. I joined as Head of UX with the rewrite already underway and urgent. Three constraints ran at once: the rebuild itself, a buyer the business had never sold to, and a rebrand nobody had settled that would land after the design was finished. Enterprise EAP meant the buyer and the user were no longer the same person: an employer was purchasing care for its staff. Every member had to resolve to a company account and an entitlement, and see what they had left. The design problem sits at that boundary, where a member's included sessions run out mid-course of care and the system has to be what tells them.

solution

The Head of Product and I argued that the product should offer to continue self-funded rather than stop. We took it to the CEO, who adopted it. Members covered by more than one employer or sponsoring organisation pushed the design hardest: their entitlements had to resolve without asking them to understand their own eligibility. The design's answer was a sensible default: auto-select the entitlement with the most sessions available, with a manual override for members who wanted the choice.

Registering through the employer

Members registered through an employer signup code, the mechanism I pushed for: a code that was itself a valid URL, so it could sit on an intranet, land in a staff email, print as a QR code, or be typed in raw.

Protecting disclosure at work

Customer organisations were buying workforce health reporting. Members were disclosing mental health information at work. We designed the reporting anonymous and aggregated from the outset, directional only, never at a granularity that could expose an individual. Employers would have preferred more detail; we traded it for members trusting the platform enough to use it.

Designing ahead of the rebrand

The rebrand could not be allowed to block development. Leadership held the final business identity as potentially still open, and several partnership deals under negotiation would likely have involved white-labelling for providers such as health funds.

So I set the design approach as a stated constraint: minimal effort to align with the current brand, and not so opinionated that it could not carry someone else's. Front-end engineering and I worked through whether the build could carry it and planned the implementation, and we established a component-driven design system and Storybook workflow from day one, so brand and UI flexibility was structural.

The trade was distinctiveness, and build time on a rewrite that was already urgent. With three points of uncertainty live at once, I took both costs to keep the platform able to absorb change.

Building the team

I identified the design capability gap, ran the hiring, and built and led a two-person senior product design team based in Indonesia, with the CEO making the final call on hires. Both ran their own work inside delivery squads; I set direction and priorities and held the craft bar through critique.

How it ended

There was too little data to project uptake or customer performance honestly, so I would not have measured the design on either. The targets I would have argued for were operational, and they measure the bet directly: time to stand up a white-labelled brand, and time to implement the rebrand once it landed. Those are targets. Nothing was measured.

The platform was being built toward an enterprise rollout across a funder's 80,000 staff, with expansion into Asia and Europe to follow, which is why we were designing for live translation. That funding fell through. The role was made redundant in August 2025, the platform went to a distressed acquirer, and I have no visibility of what became of it.

year

2024–2025

timeframe

March 2024 to August 2025