Univa Health · Gamified Eating Disorder Recovery

Overview

Led UX design of a dual mobile app platform supporting young people recovering from eating disorders and their carers, combining clinical guidance, behaviour change theory, and gamification.

The challenge

Eating disorders are deeply personal and complex. The product had to support emotional regulation, engagement, and adherence across two very different user groups: patients (ages 13–21), often sensitive to triggering content, and carers (often parents) seeking clarity, reassurance, and structured guidance.

Design approach

Designed a virtual garden metaphor for the patient app: CBT-based mechanics with biomes, rewards, and a care-guide avatar, built without weight, food, or calorie metrics to avoid triggers. The carer app took a structured, non-gamified approach focused on clarity and emotional support, including a "What to Say" feature and privacy-respecting progress visibility. A clinical portal gave NHS clinicians high-level visibility of patient progress and risk indicators within existing workflows.

Design system, built from scratch

There was no design system when I joined Univa. I built one, a Figma library covering components, tokens, and accessibility rules aligned to WCAG 2.1 AA, used across the patient app, the carer app, and the clinical portal. Every screen in this case study comes from that same system.

AI as part of the workflow

The design system was not just documentation, it was what made AI usable for real design work. I trained Claude on our component library, tokens, and accessibility rules, so it could generate UI variations that already matched the system instead of generic output that needed rebuilding by hand. Without a design system that thorough, AI generated design would not have been usable here. The Small steps feature below is one example, drafted with AI assisted variations against the existing system, then refined and shipped.

UX audit agents

Alongside the design work, I built custom agents that reviewed screens against usability heuristics and our WCAG 2.1 AA checklist automatically, catching issues before they reached manual QA. This ran continuously through development rather than as a one off check at the end.

A portal built for clinicians, not just patients

The programme also needed a side for the clinical team. I designed the NHS clinical portal so a clinician can see a patient's food diary, mood diary, and risk status on one screen, triage a list of high risk patients by outstanding action rather than alphabetically, and read adherence trends across chapters and check ins at a glance. Same design system, same tokens, built for a completely different user and a completely different job to be done.

Outcome

Delivered an MVP ready for NHS pilot rollout, with positive feedback from early user testing. The Figma design system (WCAG 2.1 AA) was adopted as the foundation for ongoing development.

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