Serenis is an online medical centre known for psychotherapy. Nutrizione is its nutrition vertical: video consultations with registered nutritionists, a private chat with your professional, and a personalised plan. I was the sole designer, working alongside a single PM, and we took it from nothing to launch in about three months.
Serenis had already solved a hard problem once: getting people to trust an online service with their mental health. Nutrition looked adjacent, with the same format (video consultations with a certified professional) and the same infrastructure (matching, booking, chat), but the emotional territory is different in a way that matters.
Nutrition carries the entire cultural weight of dieting. Most digital nutrition products are built on calorie counting, weight graphs, and macro rings, which turn eating into a scoreboard you can lose at. For a medical company operating in the same house as its psychotherapy service, shipping another calorie tracker would have been both off-brand and, for some users, actively harmful.
The constraint made it sharper: three months, two people, and an existing design system built for therapy.
I was the only designer. In practice that meant owning the patient-facing product end to end (flows, interaction, UI, and the extensions to the design system) while the PM owned scope, the relationship with the clinical side, and prioritisation. With a team of two there's no handoff ceremony: decisions got made in conversation and one of us went and did them.
The obvious build was a food log: search a food database, log the portion, get calories and macros back.
A standard calorie/macro food log: the default pattern for nutrition apps. It would've shipped faster, but it turns eating into a score, and a mental-health company putting a scoreboard in front of patients was a risk I wasn't willing to hand the PM without saying so first.
We built the opposite.
In the Serenis food diary you describe the meal in your own words: “1 yogurt greco naturale e 1 banana” (a Greek yogurt and a banana), in a free text field. No database lookup, no portion picker, no calorie total. What the diary asks for instead is context and experience:
Home, work, or out, and at what time.
A lot, a little, or not at all.
Before and after the meal, on a five-point emotional scale.
A free text prompt: were you happy, sad, indifferent?
The rationale is straightforward once stated: a nutritionist doing a 30-minute video consultation every few weeks doesn't need a calorie total the patient guessed at. They need the pattern: that the frustrating meals cluster at lunch, that hunger stays high after dinner, that eating at work looks different from eating at home. That's clinical signal a professional can actually use, and it's also the kind of self-observation that changes behaviour on its own.
There's a second-order effect: a diary with no score can't be failed. Nothing in the interface tells the user they went over a limit, because there is no limit in the interface.
A daily diary is a commitment device, and commitment devices produce guilt when you miss a day. Several small decisions worked against that:
The prompt reads “Se te la senti, valuta questa giornata” (“if you feel up to it”). Permission to skip is written into the microcopy rather than left implicit.
A logged day reads “Molto bene” (“very good”); an unlogged one reads “Da completare” (“to complete”), not “missed”, not a broken streak, no red.
The note attached to a meal in the diary is the emotional one, surfaced alongside the food itself.
They show what happened, not what should have.
A six-month path with a consultation every few weeks means most of the relationship happens in the gaps. The chat had to hold that: conversation with your nutritionist, plus an attachments panel grouping shared files by month, so the meal plan sent in June is still findable in August without scrolling back through the thread.
It reads deliberately like a messaging app people already know (read states, unread dividers, attachments), because the goal was zero learning curve for a patient who may not be comfortable with digital products.
Nutrizione shipped on Serenis' existing design system: the same purple, the same navigation shell, the same component language as the therapy product. That was a deliberate constraint, not a limitation to work around: for a patient, the consistency signals same medical centre, same standard of care, and for a two-person team in three months it was the only way to hit the date.
Where the system didn't have what nutrition needed (the diary, the meal entry flow, the emotional scales), I extended it rather than inventing a parallel visual language, and designed each new pattern to work at both desktop and mobile from the start.
Before launch, I ran usability tests on the diary entry flow and the new patterns. They surfaced flow issues early enough to fix them before release, not after it.
Nutrizione shipped on schedule, three months after kickoff, and went live to every patient booking a nutrition consultation, not a pilot cohort. The PM's read afterward: the diary produced fewer of the confused “what counts as a portion” messages the team expected, because patients were just describing meals in their own words instead of guessing at a database entry.
The 100K+ figure on this platform describes Serenis as a whole, not adoption of this feature specifically. I'm naming that distinction because it's an easy one to blur.
I don't have usage numbers to share here: Serenis is a regulated medical platform and patient data isn't mine to publish. What I'd track if I could: daily check-in completion without a guilt-driven drop-off after a missed day, how often the free-text emotional note gets used rather than skipped, and whether nutritionists report the pre-session summary actually changes how they run a consultation.