Project Overview

As the Product Lead, I sometimes spend my "free" time on this pet project in the evenings. My co-founder, Dr. Lavelle, is a clinical psychologist focusing on eating disorders and she came up with the grand idea of a compassionate AI that can be used as a supplement to help people eat in a way that makes them feel better about themselves. Since this is currently still in the works, I can only share the process that got us to the point we are now.

User Research

User stories and Empathy Maps were created to get the team on the same page. Dr. Lavelle also shared her high-level visions that needed to be translated into more tangible product development stages.

Market Validation & User Testing

Based on Dr. Lavelle’s patients’ current pains in grasping their eating disorders, this sparked an idea for Bea, an AI, who is available 27/4. And since psychology sessions aren’t available in the evenings when most people tend to binge, Bea would be their go-to companion to help talk them through a difficult moment using long-term benefit methods.

I further validated the product by leading user testing sessions with a prototype of the alpha product. The user testing sessions revealed a clear path that helped slim down the product strategy.

Experience Design

Next, we had to create this massive script that would be used to feed into the proprietary knowledge layer. This method gives the flexibility of having Bea to be plugged into any Large Language Model (LLM). Bea's potential interaction with the user was visualized in Miro, and then the site maps, wireframes, and visual designs soon followed for the dashboard that will monitor a user’s progress.

App Store release coming soon in early 2024!