Rafi
A friend who is always there for you.
Concept
Stress and anxiety don't wait for a scheduled therapy session. Most people managing them day to day need something lower-stakes than clinical treatment but more structured than a generic wellness app, a way to check in with themselves, express what they're feeling privately, and reach for a coping tool that actually fits the moment they're in.
Rafi is a mobile companion built around that gap: guided, self-paced, low-touch mental health support, fronted by Rafi, a small green frog who turns checking in into something that feels like talking to a friend rather than filling out a form.
The Challenge
The brief was simple to state and hard to solve well: many people struggle to manage stress and anxiety in daily life, and it erodes their mental well-being over time. The product needed to lower that load without requiring the commitment, cost, scheduling, disclosure, that keeps people from seeking therapy in the first place.
That meant designing for someone who might open the app mid-panic attack, and for someone who just wants a five-minute breathing exercise before bed, without making either one feel like the wrong use case.
Exploring the Solution Space
Before landing on Rafi's shape, I weighed five different directions against each other:
- A psychoeducation library (articles, videos, interactive modules), builds knowledge and supports informed decisions, but knowledge alone doesn't lower stress in the moment.
- Digital mood journaling gives users insight into their own patterns and triggers, though consistency is hard to sustain, especially when things are already difficult.
- A self-assessment tool for early detection with coping strategies, useful for catching problems early, but edges toward a clinical framing that risked feeling like a diagnosis rather than support.
- Guided mindfulness and relaxation exercises immediate, accessible relief, though effectiveness varies a lot from person to person.
- An emergency resources section with crisis hotlines and guides, critical when someone needs it, but only as good as its coverage, and easy to bury inside a normal app structure.
No single direction covered the range of what a user might need on a given day. Rafi combines all five, layered by severity, rather than betting on any single lane: light-touch mood check-ins and mindfulness at one end, a private diary in the middle, and a two-tier crisis response, in-app coping tools first, real emergency contacts as the escalation, at the other.
Meet Rafi
Four pillars, one frog holding them together:
“Hello, Sarina! How are you feeling today?” A daily mood prompt that routes into relevant content, sitting above a “Featured for you” feed of short practices.
Onboarding sets the tone in Rafi's own voice: “A friend who is always there for you.” The product introduces itself as a relationship, not a feature list.
Private notes, unlocked with Face ID, so it's a space only the user can get into.
Browsed by goal rather than assigned by an algorithm, with named practitioners behind the featured content.
The User Journey
Entry is a decision tree, not a straight line into the app. After the splash screen, three onboarding screens set expectations, that Rafi meets you where you are, that the diary is a private space, and that Rafi is a constant companion, before an account is ever requested.
Then comes the hard branch: "Are you in critical condition right now?" Yes leads to a location permission prompt and then a list of nearby emergency psychological support contacts, tap-to-call, no login required. No continues into a normal log in or sign up.
Support isn't only that emergency path, though. Selecting a difficult mood on the home screen can surface a softer, in-app moment instead, an illustration of Rafi sheltering from the rain, asking "Do you want to try this together?" and offering lighter tools like art therapy, breathing exercises, and metaphorical associative maps, with SOS still one tap away if that's not enough. An SOS button rides along nearly every screen, so help is reachable before, during, and after a session, not buried behind navigation.
Inside the Product
Splash & Onboarding
The first thing Rafi says is “A friend who is always there for you.” The onboarding screens that follow do more scene-setting than feature explaining.
Home & Mood Check-in
A personalized greeting, a one-tap mood check-in, and a “Featured for you” feed mixing short practices, each tagged with length and best time of day so the user can judge fit before committing.
The Softer Response
Reached from a harder mood check-in, this is Rafi's gentler response before any mention of a hotline: recommendations and resources to restore your condition, with SOS still one tap away if they're not enough.
The Diary
Framed at onboarding as a safe space, then enforced with Face ID at the door. Once inside, entries are freeform and timestamped, reinforcing that this section is for the user's eyes only.
Explore
Browsing by goal, Mindful Tools, Dailies, Soundscapes, Music, Meditation, Sleep, rather than a fixed path, with New and Noteworthy content credited to named practitioners.
SOS & Emergency Contacts
Tapping SOS asks permission to use location, then returns a straightforward, tap-to-call list of nearby emergency psychological support services. No extra steps between asking for help and reaching it.
What I'd Still Want to Validate
- The critical-condition branch at onboarding is the piece I'd most want to test with real users: does asking that question immediately, before any other screen, read as reassuring or alarming on first open?
- Whether the two-tier support model is legible in the moment, does a distressed user actually understand that the “try this together” screen is a first step and SOS is the escalation, or does having two different help paths create hesitation right when clarity matters most?
- Whether the mood-tag vocabulary (Sad, Calm, Anxious, Tired, Panicked, Unsure) matches how people actually describe distress in the moment.
More Screens
More screens from the prototype. View the full Figma file
Charity Wachira
View Figma prototype →