Tava lets you switch therapists quickly, and it does that part well. The problem is the people who never get that far — one or two sessions in, no rebooking, then silence. They don’t complain and they don’t switch. They just stop.
This began as a design exercise. I took it well past what it asked for, because the problem turned out to be more interesting than the brief: a post-session check-in that turns a quiet exit into a conversation.
Watch the 5-minute walkthroughTwo failure modes, and only one of them is visible.
The first is switching. It works — but every switch costs a first session. You restart your history with someone new, and the intake burns the hour you came for. That came up constantly in research as the biggest complaint about changing providers.
The second is the one I wanted to solve: people who just ghost. They’re the majority, and the product never hears from them. The question isn’t “why did they leave?” It’s why didn’t they rebook?
I started in Whimsical with sketches and wireframes — about eleven directions for where an intervention could live. I compared all of them against the same four questions: when do you ask, what do you ask for, how is it framed, and who starts it.
Two survived. A concierge chat, where a person or an AI sits between you and the problem and surfaces prebuilt cards — here’s a fix, here are people you could try, here are open times. And a post-session check-in, which is simpler and lands while the feeling is still fresh.
I flowcharted both and compared them side by side. The check-in ran bigger as a flow, and it’s the one I picked.
Most of the time, leaving isn’t about the therapist being wrong. It’s about one thing that never got said.
So the check-in offers to say it for you. “What would you like them to know?” — a few starter prompts, or write your own. Then, before anything sends: “Here’s exactly what we’ll send.” You see the message, you can edit it, you can back out.
It isn’t anonymous, on purpose. If a provider has one client, anonymity is a promise you can’t keep — so don’t make it. What Tava can offer instead is mediation: it comes from Tava, on your behalf, and there’s a paper trail.
The three lines under the message are doing the real work — they’ll get it before Friday, she’ll know it’s from you, you don’t have to bring it up. Every one answers a reason somebody would close the screen instead of sending.
The switch path attacks the thing that makes switching expensive: starting over. You pick from a short list of providers, then choose what goes with you — past notes, AI summaries, assessments. Your next therapist starts already knowing something about you, so session one isn’t spent rehashing. Then date, time, summary, and it’s on your calendar.
Booking is where good intentions go to die, so it stays inside the same sheet — month, day, time, confirm. No hand-off to a separate scheduler, no second app, no losing the thread you just worked up the nerve to pull.
Calm, functional motion — no celebration. Nothing cheers when you tell your therapist something isn’t working. Whether a flow like this feels gentle or clinical can’t be answered in a static frame, so every transition is a replayable study in the prototype above.