Cerebral is a digital mental health platform offering therapy and medication management. As the sole product designer embedded in the growth and marketing pillar, I owned the end-to-end UX of the full-funnel conversion experience, from landing page to checkout. My mandate was to design, test (when able), and iterate on experiences that moved users through the funnel more effectively, working closely with a product manager, engineering, and marketing in a lean, fully remote team.
The funnel was a one-size-fits-all experience that wasn't communicating value clearly, wasn't accounting for different user intents, and wasn't converting.
User research and behavioral data surfaced a consistent picture:
- Users were dropping off at the payment screen at a disproportionate rate. Exit analysis in Heap pointed to a value perception gap, not a price objection. The cost wasn't the issue; the case for it hadn't been made yet.
- A meaningful segment of traffic showed hesitation patterns early in the funnel, bouncing between screens and exiting without taking action, suggesting users weren't sure what type of support they were looking for, yet the funnel offered no guidance or branching for this group.
- The funnel treated high-intent and low-intent users identically. A user ready to book an appointment and a user still exploring their options were sent down the same path, creating unnecessary friction for both.
- Getting to a scheduled appointment required too many clicks. Every mandatory step — account creation, insurance verification, credit card capture — was a potential exit point, and the funnel wasn't doing enough to justify each ask before making it. (What we'd later learn: it wasn't the number of steps that drove drop-off. Data showed a positive correlation between longer flows and higher purchase conversion. The real problem was friction without value, not friction itself.)
These weren't just UX problems, they were growth problems. The friction wasn't concentrated in one place; it was distributed across the entire journey. Solving it required both qualitative insight into what users were telling us, and quantitative discipline around where exactly they were leaving and why.
Hypothesis 1: There are too many clicks from when people click into get started to choosing a clinician/appt day/time
Before designing, we partnered with a user researcher from CoLab to conduct a competitive audit of nine mental health platforms, examining what high-performing conversion funnels actually looked like and where Cerebral had room to improve.
What we looked at:
- Conversion flow audit across Talkiatry, BetterHelp, Grow Therapy, Talkspace, Thriveworks, Rula, Headway, LifeStance, and Helloalma, each reviewed end-to-end as a user seeking talk therapy for moderate anxiety
- Web performance data via SEMrush, including purchase conversion rate, bounce rate, time on site, and page views
- Brand tracking data via Tracksuit
What we found:
The most important finding flipped one of our early assumptions. Shorter funnels don't convert better. The top performing competitors had flows that lasted 25 or more pages, and there is a positive correlation between longer flows and higher purchase conversion rates. That meant our problem wasn't the length of the funnel; it was what was happening inside it.
Brand tracking data from Tracksuit added a sharper edge to that finding. Cerebral ranked second lowest in trust among its competitors. In a category where users are making decisions about their mental health care, trust isn't just a brand metric; it's a conversion metric. Users weren't failing to find Cerebral. They were finding it and not feeling confident enough to commit.
Talkiatry led in purchase conversion rate despite having one of the longest flows. What set them apart wasn't brevity; it was how deliberately they removed friction and built trust at every step. They made painful but necessary moments like insurance verification and scheduling feel effortless, while simultaneously making users feel known through personalized intake questions and transparent matching. Long flow, low friction, high trust. And it converted.
The audit reframed our design mandate. The goal wasn't to shorten the funnel or remove steps. It was to earn each step, reducing friction where it was painful and building trust where users were uncertain. With trust already a weak point for the brand, every moment in the funnel was an opportunity to either reinforce or undermine a user's confidence in Cerebral. The question we kept coming back to was: at every point in this flow, does the user feel like we know them and are trying to help them?
Sole product designer across the full conversion funnel. I worked in close partnership with the product manager and engineering team, and collaborated with the one other product designer on the team, whose focus was primarily the EMR, for cross-functional design alignment. I partnered with marketing when we introduced consultations into the funnel and needed to determine where and how to surface them within the experience. I was responsible for:
- Discovery, competitive audit, and design exploration
- UX flows and high-fidelity Figma prototypes
- Translating design decisions into rapid iterations based on what we observed
- Developer handoff, QA, and continued iteration post-launch
1. Personalized funnel experiences by user type
I redesigned the funnel entry point to route users into tailored experiences based on their intent: high-intent therapy users ready to book, low-intent users who needed more guidance before committing, and medication-focused users who prioritized speed and appointment availability over clinician selection. Each path was designed to surface the right information at the right moment, reducing unnecessary friction for users who were ready, and providing reassurance for users who weren't.
2. Pre-signup intake questions
Discovery confirmed what we suspected: users needed to feel known before they would commit. One of the clearest ways to do that was to ask better questions earlier, but first we had to earn the right to ask them.
Working with the PM and a content writer who helped shape the tone and wording, I designed two opening screens positioned before the questions began. Rather than dropping users straight into a questionnaire, these screens set expectations, addressed anxiety upfront around privacy and payment, and gave users permission to continue with confidence rather than hesitation. Discovery told us Cerebral ranked second lowest in trust among competitors; these screens were the most direct design response to that finding.
From there, the intake questions gathered preferences and context before account creation, signaling to users that Cerebral was building an experience around them specifically. This gave the funnel a more consultative feel, reduced the cold transactional quality of the original experience, and provided the product team with richer data to inform downstream decisions. The feature scaled to 100% of traffic.
3. Clinician selection and scheduling
The therapist selection experience wasn't broken, but it wasn't working as hard as it could. The original layout wasn't using space effectively, and when a user wanted to see available appointment times, they were taken to a separate page. That extra navigation step interrupted momentum at a critical decision point.
The redesign kept users in context. I reworked the therapist card layout to surface more relevant information upfront, and replaced the separate scheduling page with a flyout that showed available dates and times inline. Users could evaluate a therapist and book an appointment without ever leaving the selection screen.
The intake questions we asked earlier in the flow were directly mapped to the filters on the selection page. If a user had answered a question about their preferences or needs, those filters were already selected when they arrived at the therapist results. The funnel wasn't just collecting information; it was visibly using it, which reinforced the feeling that Cerebral was paying attention and building an experience around them specifically.
The competitive audit had shown that the highest converting competitors were investing in making users feel matched and guided before asking for commitment. This was Cerebral's version of that, reducing the friction between "I think this person could help me" and "I've scheduled my first appointment."
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Arrival to Lead | 2.76% | 8.6% |
The rate more than tripled, about a 212% lift, measured week over week from late February to late March.
