Designed for restoration, not restriction.

Eating disorders are psychiatric illnesses with serious medical consequences, and they often begin in adolescence. For adolescents, research shows that family-based treatment, delivered at home with parents at the center, is among the most effective approaches. Let's Kill Ed is built on two established clinical frameworks rather than inventing its own.

In family-based treatment, parents take responsibility for every meal while their child recovers, and the care team needs to know whether the child is getting enough. In practice, that meant spreadsheets, sticky notes, and diet apps. The diet apps were the worst option: their whole model is a deficit, with red warnings when you go over.

The product serves people with different needs. The parent does the logging, usually exhausted and mid-meal. The child is the patient. Dietitians, therapists, and doctors need a clear picture between appointments.

We started as the users. Then we tested what we'd learned against other families and the clinicians who treat them, so the product wasn't built for one household's habits.

Recovery tools tend to sound like a clinic or a diet app. I wanted neither. The creative bet was the name itself: Let's Kill Ed. It turns a diagnosis into a shared enemy and gives an exhausted family a rallying cry. Ed is the illness, never the child. Once that's clear, the family stops fighting each other and starts fighting it together.

That one idea set the rules for everything that followed: the mark, the voice, the color, and how the app behaves at the table. Every decision answers to the same tension, and the vision for the product sits in the middle of it.

Clinical tools feel cold, and wellness apps feel like they're selling something. I aimed between them. A calm slate blue carries the interface, and a warm gold marks hope and action. Nunito's rounded forms soften every number on the screen. Generous radii, soft surfaces, and large type are there for tired eyes and small screens.

The mark carries the story. The eyes come from the name our family gave the illness. The sword is the tool to fight it with, and the shape opens into a butterfly, a symbol of recovery.

Family-based treatment moves in phases, and what a family needs changes with each one. The beta focuses on the heaviest phase, when parents carry every meal. The roadmap follows the arc from there, so guidance stays relevant and responsibility can shift back to the young person when the care team says it's time.

A small team can't afford drift between design and code. I defined the system first in Claude Design, as named colors, type styles, and components, then used Claude for AI-assisted design-to-code so new screens came out on-system by default. That freed our time for the decisions that mattered: tone, edge cases, and the moments when a family is struggling.

The same approach scales up. Clear components and written principles are what let AI tools, and new designers, produce work that meets the bar without a principal reviewing every pixel.

Building in health care means building consciously. Every product decision affects someone's health, privacy, and trust. These are the lessons I'd bring to any patient experience.