The Problem
The kids aren’t alright.
Sources: KFF analysis of the Teen National Health Interview Survey, and the CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey.
California’s Department of Health and Human Services partnered with Kooth and IDEO to ask: how might we support young people in getting the care they need to be mentally well, statewide and for free?
As Co-Lead Interaction Designer, I shaped the app’s onboarding, tools, content, community, and coaching over a year of work with the Kooth team, client partners, and clinical stakeholders, from first sketch to beta. Soluna launched on iOS and Android in January 2024, in English and Spanish.
The Process
I built continuous research loops into the project, working with young people and psychiatric providers to balance a space teens wanted to use against real clinical efficacy.
More from the research: designing a dream app, collaging what a “goal” feels like, brainstorming content formats, and a coaching-critique feedback session.
Working with Young People
Over the course of a year I spoke with more than 150 young people, in Dscout sessions and through a project co-design council, asking everything from how they visualize emotion to what they’d want to know about a mental health coach before trusting one.
From working with young people, I learned three big things.
Working with Providers
Working with the physicians, nurses, and psychologists on our clinical oversight group, I built a theory of change for the work and chose the psychological framework behind the tools section.
With the clinical oversight group, I designed the tools around Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which centers on discovering a person’s own values rather than handing them one. That felt right for teenagers, who are told what to value more often than they’re asked.
The brief asked for content and coaching. Young people asked for something they could use in the moment.
The Solution
Soluna is a digital mental wellbeing toolkit meant to address the growing need for mental health content, coaching and tools for young people in California.
Key Pathways
Content
Learning about mental wellbeing builds a young person’s resilience, but there’s more competing for their attention than ever. I designed the content around a clear path to progress, with different formats for different types of learners.
Each content theme (like living with anxiety or body image) is grouped into a constellation. Each constellation has:
- Stories: educational tappable micro bits of information on the topic.
- Quizzes: swipable questions to test young people’s knowledge around a topic.
- Scenarios: text scenarios that help young people apply the topic to a challenge in their real life.
Tools
The tools pathway gives young people a place to feel calmer in the moment: clinically validated tools like breathwork, journaling, and a noise cleanse, alongside a few new, more artistic ones:
Starboard: a haptic feedback fidget for when young people need a distraction to get through a moment.
Let It Out: a tool that listens to young people rant, and then helps them fling it out of sight.
Thought Shaker: a magic mirror that provides affirmations to shake all the negative thoughts from their heads.
Coaching
I created the coaching platform alongside developing the service design for how coaching will work from a business perspective.
Young people sometimes needed help in the moment, in addition to continued or scheduled support. With coaching there are two options:
Drop-in hours: get in a queue to talk to someone as soon as possible.
or
Scheduled coaching: young people can browse through coaches to find the right one for them, and schedule a recurring time that works.
All coaches are briefed on the crisis escalation pathway and prepared to refer to local resources if young people are in crisis.
Wrap Up
Soluna launched statewide in January 2024 and has since reached over 160,000 registered young people across California. 95% of users say they’d recommend it to a friend, 87% say it helped them access the mental health support they needed, and 49% say they wouldn’t have had access to that support otherwise. An independent evaluation by Northwestern University found users saw reductions in distress and anxiety within a month, with those gains holding three months later. Other states, including New Jersey, have since explored bringing Soluna’s model to their own young people.
Figures from Soluna’s 2024 to 2025 impact reporting, with the evaluation by Northwestern University’s Lab for Scalable Mental Health.
I put my heart into Soluna. It’s still one of my favorite projects.
“This is so cool. I feel like I actually get mental health now that it’s put into a context I get.”
· Miley, Soluna user