Psyché: therapy notes you can still find two years later
A note-taking concept for therapists. Notes are organised by topic, not by date, so a client's history opens in one tap during the session.
My role:
UX/UI designer, end-to-end: research, information architecture, UI, visual design
Client
Self-initiated concept
Industry
Note apps
Category
UX/UI · product
Tools
Figma
Year
Overview
Therapy runs for years, so what a therapist needs to recall mid-session is usually in a note from months ago, and finding it means lots of scrolling the archive. Most of the time nobody looks, and the notes stop being used.
Psyché keeps each kind of information in its own block, and every block holds everything ever written in it across the whole therapy. One tap opens years of one theme, so a therapist can use what they wrote two years ago without stepping out of the conversation to find it.
I interviewed three therapists in private practice. They do not bill insurance, so their notes are written for nobody but themselves.
Designed in 2022. I would still build the retrieval model today, but let app organise information for the user from free input.
A hundred sessions, and no way to find anything
Notes are stored per client, one per session. Weekly therapy for two years is about a hundred of them on one person, and the number next to each name is the real problem: everything is already written down, and none of it is reachable in the middle of a conversation.
Grouped by what the information is, not by when it was said
A note belongs to a session, but what is written in it does not stay there. Each kind of information has its own block and its own timeline. Every block has two tabs, Current for today and All for the whole therapy, and any line can be pinned to stay in Current.
Five blocks that came out of the interviews
Interventions, hypotheses, tasks, questionnaires, and life facts. Each one holds something the therapists I spoke to were already tracking by hand. None of them belongs to a single school: the same five cover work that is tightly structured, like CBT, and work that is not, like psychodrama.
And a way to build your own
No set fits every therapist, so a block can be built from scratch out of text, lists, tables and checkboxes. A block the therapist builds gets the same two tabs as the built-in ones, so their own structure collects history in exactly the same way.
A separate layer for thinking after the session
After a session, the therapist can open a comment layer in the margin: a question for supervision, a theme to come back to, or a thought worth keeping. A comment attaches to the block it belongs to, so a year later it is still next to its subject.
Results
The retrieval model still holds up. The input does not, and today I would let AI do the sorting.
The structure pays off when the therapist goes back to something, but it charges for that in advance: every note is sorted into the right block by hand, during the session. In 2022 I thought that was a fair trade. I no longer do, though I never put it in front of users to know for sure.
Today the input would be an audio recording or free text, and the system would do the structuring. What I would keep is the retrieval model: AI note-takers make writing faster and leave the archive just as hard to search.
I did not design for it, but in North America, where therapists file progress notes in formats like SOAP or DAP, the same per-client structure could feed those notes instead of being retyped into them.
