đź”— Official product website đź”— Rune Labs website
As Director of Design for Europe, I led a full redesign of StrivePD over three years, rebuilding the UI from the ground up, establishing a cross-platform design system, and conceiving the AI-native strategy that became the product’s next major release.
StrivePD is an FDA Cleared digital companion built for people living with Parkinson’s disease.
On the patient side, an iOS app and Apple Watch work together to capture both passive signals and active symptom logs, helping users understand their condition day-to-day.
On the clinical side, StrivePD delivers comprehensive reports and web-based dashboards that give patients and clinicians a shared, data-rich view of progression and treatment efficacy.
drag to see the differences.
The situation
StrivePD had something most products don’t: a genuine origin story. It was conceived by a designer who had developed Parkinson’s herself, someone who understood the problem from the inside. That gave the product heart, and it showed.
But by the time I joined, adherence was low. The app had grown organically around one person’s vision and hadn’t been designed systematically for the full range of people with Parkinson’s, an aging population with varying degrees of motor and cognitive impairment. The UI was dated, the information architecture unclear, and many of the interaction patterns assumed a level of dexterity and focus the product’s own users often didn’t have.
The challenge wasn’t to replace what existed. It was to take something with real clinical value and make it genuinely usable for the people it was built for.
The work
I redesigned the app from the ground up: new UI across iOS and Apple Watch, a multi-platform design system, and a full rethink of several core features including Activity, Daily Check-In, Medication tracking, and Pre-Visit Preparation.
Every design decision was driven by a single question: does this work for someone with reduced motor control, cognitive load, or vision changes? That meant larger touch targets, simpler data entry flows, reduced screen complexity, and a clearer visual hierarchy throughout.
I also conducted UX research with people living with Parkinson’s and their carers, the people actually using the app, not proxy users. What I heard consistently was that the existing experience felt effortful precisely when they had the least energy to give it.
The redesign also paved the way structurally for new features to be built consistently. Before, each feature had been designed independently. Afterward, there was a coherent system to build from. The design system also absorbed a significant team restructuring mid-project — with half the design team leaving, delivery continued on schedule.
The insight behind 3.0
After the redesign shipped, I kept thinking about the core tension in the product: we had made the interface simpler and more accessible, but we were still fundamentally asking users to navigate, find things, and remember what to log. For someone in a difficult symptom day, that friction still existed.
I started having informal conversations with the data scientists and engineers on the team about where AI was heading. What emerged was a reframe: the interface didn’t need to surface everything, it needed to surface the right thing, at the right time, for that specific user. And if it could do that through conversation. Voice, text, or a single tap. It could serve users with very different levels of impairment in the same interaction.
That became StrivePD 3.0.
The 3.0 proposal
I developed the concept and built a presentation designed to be reviewed asynchronously by US leadership as we were operating across an 8-hour time difference, and I’d learned that the quality of an async presentation often determined whether an idea got traction before it ever reached a live conversation. Later, I would present at an all hands.
The proposal had three parts:
Guardian. A multimodal AI assistant embedded throughout the app. Users could type, speak, or tap from pre-defined prompts. The AI could answer questions about their data, generate on-the-fly charts correlating any two variables we collected (sleep and medication, DBS settings and walking speed, exercise and tremor), and log items directly from conversation. Conversations were saved as journal entries, giving users a longitudinal record of their own insights.
A redesigned home and log experience. Preserving the familiar structure users knew, while progressively introducing AI-assisted features. The log tab would surface likely next actions based on the user’s schedule and past behavior, reducing the cognitive load of deciding what to track.
The Home view presents the user with quick visual representations of their data, as well as giving access to the Guardian AI
I envisioned a multi-modal AI user interface where the user can have a conversation about their data using voice, typing or pre-defined questions and follow-ups.
Logging is a central aspect of the app, here a user can quickly find what they need by having smart suggestions, and a history of previous logs.
The business case. I framed this not just as a UX improvement but as a product strategy: more active users generates more patient data, more data increases clinical and research value, and an AI-first product aligns with the direction the industry (and StrivePD’s investors) were already moving toward. A better experience for users with limited motor control wasn’t a niche accessibility concern. It was the product’s core differentiator.
The concept was adopted as the strategic direction for the product’s next phase. StrivePD 3.0 has since launched, with the AI companion feature shipping as a core part of the product.
What I took from it
Working with people with Parkinson’s changed how I think about multimodal interaction. The conventional wisdom in mobile design: tap, swipe, type, collapses when your users have tremor, fatigue, or reduced fine motor control. The best interface isn’t the one that does the most. It’s the one that knows when to step in and when to get out of the way.
The other thing this project taught me is that influence in a small, distributed team isn’t about authority. It’s about the quality of your thinking and your ability to make other people feel included in a direction before they’ve formally committed to it. The 3.0 concept didn’t succeed because I had the title. It succeeded because the engineers and data scientists I’d spoken to already felt ownership over parts of it.