Small Wins
Two connected users of the same recovery — the survivor and the caregiver.
Stroke recovery moves into the home and lands on two people at once. Small Wins turns dozens of disconnected PT, OT, speech, and vision recommendations into consistent, encouraging daily routines — and treats caregiver burnout as a first-class concern, not free infrastructure.
Recovery doesn’t end at the hospital.
It moves into the home, where relearning daily life plays out over months and years — and it lands on two people at once. The survivor walks out with a stack of disconnected recommendations and no single thread to tie them together.
Two people carry recovery at home.
Relearning daily life.
- Work spread across physical, OT, speech & vision
- Needs recovery to feel achievable, not clinical
- Low energy on the hard days
Holding all of it together.
- Schedules, tracking, advocacy with providers
- The emotional weight of keeping it all going
- No support system of their own
Human resilience, not medical compliance.
Habits without overload
Build consistency without cognitive overload — only today’s slice, never the full regimen at once.
Track, delegate, sustain
Tools to track progress, manage their own burnout, and share the load with others.
Resilience over compliance
Encouragement and momentum — not a medical checklist that reads as one more thing to fail at.
Help both turn scattered rehab plans into consistent, encouraging daily routines?
Small, winnable habits
Make daily recovery feel like small wins — not an overwhelming regimen.
Coordinate & protect
Let a caregiver coordinate and delegate while protecting their own well-being.
Connect the two
Tie both people to the same recovery — shared data, two emotional registers.
Two parallel journeys, one shared recovery.
A single Start forks into a survivor branch and a caregiver branch — each with its own home and tools, meeting where the recovery is shared. Survivor and caregiver enter through their own doors, and the whole app is built around that split.
Onboarding that adapts to who you are.
Welcome → Create account → a short intro tour → Therapy Focus Areas. That one selection personalizes the checklist — so the survivor sees only their slice, never the whole regimen at once.
Small, winnable habits — not a medical checklist.
The caregiver enters through a different door.
“Welcome, Caregiver” asks the survivor’s name and the relationship, then offers Invite Survivor or Skip for now. Letting either person start the account — the caregiver can set up before the survivor is ready — is one of the most human decisions in the flow.
Same data, two emotional registers.
A short checklist, one Log Progress tap, streaks and affirmations — encouraging even on low days. Passive and encouraging, never nagging.
A progress overview — streak, percent complete — with the day’s most important thing surfaced.
Caregiver burnout, treated as part of the recovery.
The Burnout Check-In lets the caregiver choose how often the app checks on their well-being, and pick the topics that matter — paired with Care Circle delegation and a Care Plan Editor. Most tools treat the caregiver as free infrastructure. This one treats her as a user with her own failure mode.
Designed for someone whose body just changed.
A stroke can affect vision, motor control, and cognition — so accessibility wasn’t a pass at the end, it was the starting constraint. I worked in 25+ grayscale wireframes to keep the focus on usability before any styling.
Touch
Large, tap-friendly targets.
Effort
Minimal scrolling, simplified dashboards.
Modality
Optional audio playback.
A full-featured MVP framework, in one week.
MVP
Coherent enough to hand off to developers — or take straight into usability testing.
Interest
Strong response from healthcare designers as a model for post-acute & rehab care.
Next
A provider testing plan for adherence, resilience, and caregiver burnout.
Early feedback from healthcare designers has been positive, but no outcomes are measured yet — so I don’t quote numbers.
The hard part wasn’t the data model. It was the tone.
The same recovery data had to say encouragement to the survivor and reassurance to the caregiver. That layered tone was the real design work.
Treating the caregiver as a primary user with her own failure mode — burnout — rather than as free infrastructure around the survivor.
Treat the caregiver as a user, not as free infrastructure.
I designed this as the daughter of a stroke survivor — and I watched recovery land on two people at once. The one relearning their life, and the one quietly holding it all together. Most tools only ever see the first. Small Wins is built for both of them.
A self-directed concept project from a one-week sprint — the framework and wireframes are real; the outcomes are still ahead of it.