OVERVIEW
The primary bottleneck in modern mental healthcare is the delay between diagnosis and human intervention. As part of a UnitedHealth digital therapeutics pilot program, Bloom was designed to address that gap for patients experiencing anxiety, mild depression, and sleep disorders.
Through a physician-prescribed, rapid-deployment VR program, Bloom provides immediate support when human-led therapy is unavailable. Patients receive a headset within days of referral, complete a structured six-week program at home, and return the hardware at the end of treatment. To date, this model has demonstrated clinical results that outperform traditional human intervention at a significantly lower cost.
ROLE & SCOPE
This project required holistic creative leadership across every major touchpoint of the product’s development. It encompassed the initial concept , the creation of the brand identity, and the experience design of the VR product.
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Creative Strategy: Defining the core concept, product positioning, and delivery model.
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Identity Systems: Developing the visual language, typography, and color strategy to balance clinical trust with approachability and optimism.
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UX/UI Architecture: Designing the navigation, 3D environments, and interaction model for an autonomous, non-gamer audience.
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Audio & Content: Directing music, scripts, and voice performance to create a cohesive therapeutic tone.
4-6 WEEKS
The average national wait time for a new patient to see a mental health professional.
160 MILLION
Americans live in designated Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas (MHPSAs).
60%
Of U.S. counties do not have a single practicing psychiatrist
CORE DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Clinical Trust: The experience needed to feel credible to physicians and patients, avoiding the visual clichés often associated with meditation.
Ease Without Oversimplification: Every interaction had to feel intuitive for first-time VR users navigating the program independently at home.
Immersion with Restraint: The visual system needed to support focus and emotional engagement without introducing cognitive overload.
Therapeutic Cohesion: Brand, interface, environment, audio, and content all had to work together as one calming, clinically credible experience.
THE STIGMA BARRIER
Building Clinical Trust Through Visual Deconstruction
To earn physician trust and overcome the quiet stigma that still surrounds meditation, the design had to move beyond its familiar visual clichés. A language of Clinical Optimism was established to ensure the experience felt like a sophisticated healthcare tool rather than a mystical practice.
THE LOGO: An Abstracted Heritage
The Bloom identity draws from lotus symbolism, but its form was intentionally abstracted to move away from overt spiritual cues. By reducing it to a series of overlapping, translucent ovals, the mark suggests growth and centering without esoteric connotations. The result bridges ancient practice and modern clinical science.
VISUAL STRATEGY
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Soft Geometry: Overlapping circles and rounded rectangles were used to signal safety and fluidity. For users in a heightened state of anxiety, these forms help create a welcoming, low-friction environment.
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Instead of the muted earth tones common to the category, the palette uses vibrant, translucent color fields. This creates a sense of depth and energy that feels both hopeful and technologically sophisticated.
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Typography: Nunito was paired with Inter to balance warmth with technical precision. Quicksand introduces an approachable, human quality, while the overall typographic system reinforces the credibility of a professional healthcare platform.
VISUALIZING THE INVISIBLE
Transforming Internal Focus into a Spatial Experience
Traditional meditation is typically an eyes-closed practice, which creates a core paradox in VR therapy. The visual approach had to give users a reason to keep their eyes open without adding cognitive overload. The solution was to design experiences that either naturally depend on open eyes, such as object-focus exercises, or benefit from visual reinforcement by turning mental imagery into something visible within the VR world.
This principle shaped both the exercises and the environments around them. Practices such as progressive muscle relaxation and visualization-based meditations were paired with subtle spatial cues that made internal processes feel tangible. Bloom itself functioned not only as the name of the application, but as a recurring visual anchor within it, serving as a focal point throughout the experience.
The environments were designed to do more than contain the experience. As meditations progress, flowers open, fog clears, weather shifts, ambient audio evolves, and pulses of energy move outward from the user into the surrounding world. These changes act as both metaphor and feedback, reinforcing a sense of movement, connection, and internal change. Over time, the environments also become memory triggers, helping users recall feelings of calm outside the headset by associating them with a place that feels experientially real.
The Bloom of Bloom — designed to ground visual attention
DESIGNING FOR INDEPENDENCE
Reducing Friction for First-Time VR Users
The resulting interface kept decision-making lightweight and sequential. To begin a meditation, users make just three choices, presented one at a time rather than all at once. The experience unfolds in small, manageable steps, allowing the interface to recede and the therapeutic content to remain in focus.
In practice, the system became nearly invisible. Once inside Bloom, users were able to navigate the experience without support, a quiet but meaningful validation of the design approach.
Bloom’s interface was built around a simple principle: reduce friction at the moment someone needs calm the most. Patients were expected to use the system independently at home, often with little or no prior experience in VR, so every interaction had to feel intuitive without becoming overly simplified.
That clarity came from observation as much as intention. Watching first-time users navigate Bloom prototypes and other VR applications revealed how foreign many default interaction patterns were, particularly for older users with no gaming background.
One example was the controller trigger. Initially, the goal was to avoid relying on it at all, since it felt unintuitive to users more familiar with television remotes than game controllers. Over time, however, it became clear that the trigger was too central to the Meta ecosystem to ignore. Rather than resist that convention, the design embraced it and made it a clear, deliberate part of onboarding.
DESIGNING FOR REAL-WORLD USE
Adapting the experience to how patients actually used it
Early user feedback revealed a clear pattern: many people were using Bloom right before bed, and some were sensitive to the overall brightness of VR headsets during those moments.
Rather than treating this as a cosmetic preference, the response was to treat it as a design opportunity. Light and dark modes were introduced as a functional system that expanded environmental choice, reduced perceived brightness and blue-light exposure, and better supported pre-sleep use.
This approach allowed Bloom to adapt to how people were actually using it, making it easier to integrate into nighttime routines and everyday life rather than prescribing a single ideal way to engage.
Light and dark versions of the hot springs environment
AUDIO AS REGULATION
Using sound to support calm, pacing, and presence
Bloom’s audio was designed with the same care as its visuals. Rather than relying on looping melodies, the music uses non-repeating structures that keep the mind from anticipating patterns, helping prevent the mental “filling in the blanks” that can interrupt relaxation.
The compositions also gradually decrease in tempo, allowing the body to settle into a slower rhythm over time. Instead of instructing users to relax, the music quietly leads them there, supporting regulation through design rather than direction.
Ambient soundscapes further reinforce each environment, creating a sense of place without competing for attention. Together, music and environmental audio help Bloom feel less like a program being followed and more like a space being entered.
OUTCOME
Bloom’s impact was measured not only in engagement, but in outcomes. In studies conducted with UnitedHealth, users showed meaningful decreases in reported stress, anxiety, and depression.
In one particularly notable case, call center employees who used Bloom demonstrated a measurable increase in empathy-related language during customer interactions. This pointed to a behavioral shift that extended beyond self-reporting and suggested tangible improvements in the quality of service.
These results reinforced a core belief behind the project: when emotional design is treated as a serious discipline, it can shape behavior in ways that are both human and measurable. Bloom became a compelling example of how immersive design can make wellness feel accessible, modern, and emotionally grounded, not as a niche practice, but as a practical part of everyday life.
REAL-WORLD IMPACT
Hearing directly from users reinforced something we believed from the start: thoughtful design can change not just behavior, but how people experience themselves and others.
EXTENDING BEYOND VR
For users completing the six-week VR program, access to headsets eventually ended. To maintain continuity, I led the design of a companion mobile experience that extended the same meditations, environments, and emotional tone beyond VR.
Rather than trying to replicate immersion, the mobile app focused on reinforcement, supporting habit formation through daily messaging, reminders, and quick-start sessions that helped users carry the practice into everyday life.
This ensured Bloom didn’t end when the hardware did. It became a sustained wellness system rather than a time-boxed intervention.
