Most of the interfaces we admire are designed for someone having a decent day. They're rested, curious, holding their phone with both hands, and happy to discover a clever gesture or a playful animation. Portfolio sites and design award galleries are full of work made for that person.

Mental health products are used by a different person. Sometimes it's the same human, just at 2 a.m., after a panic attack, with shaky hands and very little patience for anything that doesn't work on the first try. Designing for that moment asks for different instincts than the ones trend culture trains into us.

The argument worth reading

Kat Homan makes this case well in Smashing Magazine, in Designing For Distressed Users: Why Mental Health Apps Shouldn't Follow Every UI Fashion (July 2026). Her starting point is how badly mental health apps hold on to people: most users stop within the first month. She argues that part of the problem is design that borrows from whatever is fashionable instead of from what a stressed person needs.

She proposes checking any trendy pattern against five questions: does it reduce cognitive load, does it fit the user's emotional state, is navigation reliable and predictable, does it meet accessibility standards, and does it encourage use without pressure. And she names specific offenders: stark neo-brutalist layouts, hidden navigation that relies on unusual gestures, unlabeled abstract icons, low-contrast minimalist text, streaks and celebration screens, relentlessly cheerful palettes, dense animated screens, and urgent notifications.

It's a useful checklist and I'd recommend reading the whole piece. What follows isn't a summary of it. It's where her argument took my thinking, including one place where I'd push it further than she does.

Trends are made for a different brief

A UI trend is a solution to somebody else's problem. Neo-brutalism solves "how do we stand out in a sea of identical SaaS landing pages". Gesture-driven navigation solves "how do we give content the whole screen". Gamified streaks solve "how do we get people to come back tomorrow".

None of those are the problems of a person in distress. Their problem is closer to "I need this to work, right now, without thinking". So when a trend enters a mental health product, it usually brings its original brief along with it, quietly, and that brief competes with the one that should matter.

This is why I find "does it look modern?" such a weak question in this space. The better question is: what was this pattern originally designed to achieve, and do I want that here?

Engagement is the wrong scoreboard

Here's where I'd take Homan's argument a step further.

Her piece opens with retention numbers, and retention is the language product teams speak, so it's a smart way to get attention. But it also shows how deep the problem goes. Most digital products measure success by how much people use them. For a mental health product, heavy use can mean it's helping, or it can mean the person is struggling more. Someone who opens the app less because they're doing better is a success story that looks like churn on a dashboard.

That doesn't mean retention is meaningless. People who drop out in week one because the app was confusing haven't been helped. But if the only number a team watches is daily active users, the product will slowly drift toward the patterns that maximize daily active users: streaks, badges, nudges, guilt. Those are exactly the patterns Homan warns against.

So before arguing about any individual UI decision, it's worth asking a team what they count as success. If the answer is "time in app", the design debate is already lost. Better candidates are harder to measure but more honest: did the person complete what they came to do, did they find support when they needed it, did they come back when it was useful rather than when they were prompted.

A streak is a promise you can break

Streaks deserve their own note because they're so common and seem so harmless.

A streak turns a habit into a count, and a count can be lost. For someone learning a language, losing a streak is mildly annoying. For someone whose depression is telling them they fail at everything, a broken streak is one more piece of evidence. The app has turned a hard week into a visible failure.

If a product wants to encourage regular use, there are gentler ways to do it: show total days practiced instead of consecutive days, let people set their own rhythm, or simply welcome someone back without mentioning how long they've been gone. The design goal is that returning after a break feels easy, not embarrassing.

Calm is not the same as bland

The easy overcorrection is to strip everything back to beige and assume that's "calming". It isn't necessarily. Low-contrast gray text on an off-white background is a trend too, and a hard one to read when you're exhausted or your eyes are full of tears.

Calm, in a product, is mostly about predictability. Buttons that look like buttons and are labeled with words. Navigation that stays in the same place on every screen. Actions that can be undone. Motion that is slow, subtle and respects the system's reduce-motion setting. Nothing that surprises you. A product can have plenty of personality and warmth in its illustration and writing while keeping its structure completely boring, and in this context, boring structure is a kindness.

The worst-day walkthrough

Here's a practical test that falls out of all this. Take the most important flow in your product (for a mental health app, that's usually "I need help right now") and walk through it under conditions that approximate a bad moment:

• One hand, standing up, on a small phone.
• Tired, at the end of a long day, not during a fresh morning review.
• On a slow or dropping connection.
• With reduce motion and larger text turned on in your phone's settings.
• Without having logged in recently.

Then check a few specific things. How many taps until you reach a person or a crisis resource? Is that path visible from every screen, or does it hide behind a menu? Does anything ask you to log in, update the app or rate your experience before you get there? Does any message create urgency or guilt?

If the help path takes more than a couple of taps, or sits behind a login, that's the first thing to fix. Nothing else in the product matters as much.

Beyond mental health

Homan's focus is mental health apps, but the principle applies anywhere people show up stressed: a banking app when a card has been stolen, an airline app after a cancelled flight, a hospital portal the night before surgery. Every product has users on their worst day. The difference is whether anyone on the team designed for them.

So here's the question I'd leave on the table for your next project: which screen in your product is most likely to be used by someone who is scared, and when did you last test it while tired?