Airy
Airy helps therapists work smarter and reclaim time, while giving clients the between-session support most digital therapy tools forget.
Mar-June 2025
Eva Ford
Ramya Ramesh
Krishna Suresh
Xinran Li
Problem
Both therapists and clients face gaps in how therapy is documented and experienced. Together, these gaps create a disconnect that weakens the overall value of therapy.
Therapists juggle presence and documentation. Manual note taking disrupts sessions, and past notes are hard to search and synthesize over time. Between sessions, supporting clients while maintaining boundaries adds strain.
For clients, therapy often feels limited to the session, with little support in between. When progress is hard to see over time, growth can feel slow and motivation can fade.
What if therapy could extend beyond the session, bridging insights, progress, and care between therapist and client in one continuous experience?
Solution
Therapists' day at a glance
A focused dashboard that surfaces today’s sessions, recent notes, and client flags so therapists know exactly where to start without digging or context switching.
Notes without interruption
Structured session notes are generated automatically, allowing therapists to stay present during sessions and review, edit, or refine documentation afterward.
Patterns over time
Key themes and trends are surfaced across sessions, helping therapists track progress and spot insights without manually searching through past notes.
Support between sessions
Therapist-curated prompts and gentle check-ins help clients reflect and stay engaged between sessions, without creating extra messaging or boundary strain.
Lightweight, intentional touchpoints for clients
Airy offers therapist-curated nudges: lightweight check-ins and prompts that support clients between sessions without overstepping boundaries.
Optional mini sessions
Therapists can enable short, focused sessions for clients who need extra support, offering timely care without committing to a full appointment or disrupting boundaries.
Research
Starting with Competitive Analysis
Before designing anything new, we looked closely at existing tools therapists and clients rely on today. While these products solve specific problems well, none fully support the therapist–client relationship as a continuous system.
Across competitors, we identified four consistent gaps that shaped our direction.
Interviewing Key Stakeholders
We interviewed 4 licensed clinical therapists, 3 graduate psychology students, and 6 clients who had participated in online therapy within the past year to understand both sides of the therapeutic experience. We focused on how therapy is documented, experienced, and supported over time.
Therapists said…
Clients said…
The Stigma Around AI…
This led to a core design requirement:
AI in Airy must be flexible, optional, and fully controlled by the therapist, with explicit client consent.
Key Pain Points
Through research, we uncovered key insights and a core tension between therapists and clients in how progress and support are experienced.
For Therapists:
Manual note-taking interrupts the flow of sessions.
Difficult to track long-term client progress at a glance.
Valuable insights are buried in raw, unstructured notes.
For Clients:
Therapy feels confined to the 50-minute session.
Lack of support between sessions.
Hard to visualize or feel progress.
Question the value or effectiveness of therapy over time
Tension!
Therapists value clear boundaries and efficient workflows that protect their time, while clients seek continuity to feel supported between sessions.
Our solution needs to extend the impact of therapy without increasing therapist workload or compromising ethical care.
Ideation
Pain Points - How Might We - Features
Therapy progress is often subtle and nonlinear, so it is hard to measure from one session to the next. Therapists rely on scattered notes and memory to spot patterns over time, making progress tracking harder than it should be.
Let's pause on design and talk business…
Turning User Needs into Business Impact
To ground the work in measurable outcomes, my team and I started with a business requirements document that defined the scope and success metrics. Airy targets a clear opportunity:
The long-term vision: an intelligent care ecosystem!
Airy has a significant opportunity to grow beyond workflow support and become the connective layer across therapists, clients, and clinics.
The MVP lays the groundwork with core subscription value, while premium AI insights and clinic-level analytics create a scalable path toward a full, data-driven ecosystem for modern mental healthcare.
Design
Iterations & Usability Testing
In early conversations with therapists, we learned that the dashboard needed to help clinicians quickly understand what mattered most in the moment without adding cognitive load. We explored several dashboard layouts to test how tasks, alerts, and client context could be surfaced to support fast, clinically informed decisions.
I conducted usability testing across three iterations to evaluate which approach best aligned with therapists’ workflows. Rather than prioritizing information density, I focused on clarity and prioritization of key information. These tests guided the final direction of the therapist dashboard.
First Iteration:
✅ Clear at-a-glance
❌ Layout lacks urgency hierarchy
❌ Client Check-in and daily task list is long and visually flat
Second Iteration:
✅ Clearer action framing
❌ Color code doesn't reflect urgent tasks across interface
❌ Therapist has to scan multiple zones to build context
Final Iteration:
✅ Clear hierarchy of urgency (Tasks → Alerts → Notifications)
✅ High-risk alerts are clearly labeled and isolated
✅ Supports progress awareness without demanding attention
Once a session begins, in-session support surfaces relevant insights without disrupting the therapeutic flow. I explored multiple ways to integrate AI support into sessions, focusing on how prompts, notes, and summaries could aid clinical decision-making without compromising therapist autonomy.
Through iteration, the interface shifted from an AI-led experience to one that prioritizes therapist choice, flexibility, and visibility into client progress.
First Iteration:
❌ Over-centered on AI instead of therapist choice
❌ Rigid and doesn't adapt to different workflows
Final Iteration:
✅ Increase visibility into client progress
✅ Offer optional, consent-based AI support
✅ Customizable interface that adapts to individual therapist workflows
Usability testing revealed that leading with AI increased cognitive load and pulled attention away from therapists’ primary task of clinical reflection.
Early iterations that foregrounded AI outputs felt distracting and rigid, making it harder for therapists to focus on their own notes and judgment. Through iteration, we repositioned AI as optional, contextual support that enhances understanding without driving the experience.
First Iteration:
❌ Difficult to scan
❌ AI outputs felt primary while therapist-authored notes felt secondary
Second Iteration:
✅ Clear separation between notes list, note detail, and AI assistance
❌ AI tool compete for attention
❌ Columns required frequent eye movement and context switching
Final Iteration:
✅ Primary focus on therapist-authored notes and session detail
✅ Clear, linear reading experience that supports clinical reflection
❌ AI capabilities are less visible
Client Interface:
More Support for Clients, Still Less Lift for Therapists
Clients want small moments of support between sessions: reminders, check-ins, and signals they’re not alone. Therapists prefer to keep most contact in-session, so offering that support can add work or blur boundaries.
Airy’s nudge system adds light structure between visits with mini sessions, affirmations, and guided reflections that clients can leverage on their own.
Therapist-guided affirmations that give clients gentle reminders of their growth while requiring minimal effort from the therapist.
Customizable journal prompts and activities that come pre-built but remain fully editable to fit each client’s needs.
When a therapist sees that a client may need extra support between sessions, they can enable mini-sessions, allowing the client to book quick check-ins and stay grounded between visits.
Next Steps and Reflection
Pressure test trust, privacy, and governance
Define the full consent and permissions model, including per client settings, audit trails, and clear data boundaries. Validate HIPAA aligned safe defaults so therapists can adopt AI without risking trust or liability.
Validate in real clinical workflows
Pilot Airy with therapists across session types and modalities to observe where AI support helps or distracts. Test in session note capture, post session synthesis, and between session prompts to define what optional means in practice.
Design for edge cases and system scale
Expand for group therapy, crisis language, minors, and multi provider care, where documentation and follow up rules differ. Explore integration with EHR workflows so Airy fits into the system therapists already use.
Building Airy pushed me to think like a system designer. I had to map data flows, roles, consent, and failure states across two products (therapist and client) and ensure each interaction held up under privacy, trust, and operational constraints.
What sets this work apart is the governance layer behind the UI: configurable autonomy per client, transparency that explains why something is suggested, and safeguards that make the system dependable when the stakes are high.