The Grief App
The Grief App helps you understand and navigate loss. It's interactive, simple to use, and done at your own pace in the privacy of your own home. Created by a recent widow and a licensed grief therapist who recognized a significant gap in accessible grief support, it gives people a way to work through grief on their own terms. Designli, through its proprietary SolutionLab, turned the idea into a roadmap and delivered it through design and development to launch on the App Store and Google Play.
Why The Grief App?
The Grief App is a health-and-wellness app offering 24/7 grief support. It was created by a recent widow and a licensed grief therapist who, together, recognized a significant gap in accessible grief support and set out to turn their personal and professional experience of loss into a readily available tool anyone can use.
The Grief App is that tool: a 24/7 grief-support toolkit people can work through at their own pace, in the privacy of home. As their site puts it, "You don't need to be fixed. You just need somewhere to put it."
Step into the SolutionLab.
Designli's proprietary product roadmapping service, the SolutionLab, turned the founders' knowledge of grief into a concrete product plan. Sessions mapped the actors and user journeys and prioritized an MVP, with design reviews along the way, and the engagement closed with a full UI design and a clickable prototype.
Roadmap options they could compare and choose from.
Early product decisions weigh heavily on a non-technical founder, so Designli prepared roadmap options rather than one take-it-or-leave-it plan, laying the information out side by side. The founders weighed the tradeoffs and chose the prioritized MVP themselves.
Knowing what to leave out.
Community and chat features were deliberately deferred to protect vulnerable users. Every tool that did make the plan maps to a clinical principle, so the app supports grief work without presenting itself as a replacement for therapy.
Designed for a grieving mind.
Grief comes with brain fog. A grieving person has less capacity to read and less patience for a busy screen, and The Grief App treats that as a real design constraint.
For that reason, screens carry minimal text, with audio options built in. A calming green palette holds steady throughout. Flows present one idea per screen, and consistent color-coding and iconography make the app feel familiar fast.
None of these were aesthetic preferences. They were clinical decisions, grounded in a licensed grief therapist's professional knowledge of loss. Designli built the full design into a clickable, navigable prototype, so the founders could walk every flow and validate it before development began.
A dedicated product team.
From the prototype forward, a dedicated Designli team designed and developed The Grief App end to end, with a Product Owner, a Tech Lead, developers, QA, and a UX/UI designer working in two-week Scrum sprints. Every sprint review demoed working software, and product strategy sessions and monthly check-ins kept the founders close to every decision.
Designli also guided the founders through App Store and Google Play approval and optimized their infrastructure costs, explaining everything in plain language so that non-technical founders came away understanding not just the admin process but their own tech stack. The app is now live on both stores as a subscription with a free trial, and within its first week it ranked as the top organic search result in its App Store category.
Feature spotlight:
the Grief Wave.
A Grief Wave is a timed session for sitting with grief rather than pushing it away, with supportive messages along the way. When the timer ends, the app offers gentle paths onward: the journal, a workbook, the memory book, or simply a break.
Feature spotlight:
the audio journal and good moments.
When writing feels like too much, a user can speak instead. The Audio Journal records private entries and transcribes them automatically. Alongside it, small good moments captured as a photo or a line of text resurface later as brief Happiness Waves.
Feature spotlight:
workbooks the founders write themselves.
The app's interactive grief-education workbooks are written by the founders and published through a custom web CMS Designli built. Interactive templates (lists, dials, fill-in-the-blank, ranking, and more) turn their exercises into something a grieving person can complete at their own pace.
I really appreciate all the work you put into this. It was above and beyond my expectations.
I am very grateful for you getting me that information in a form I could analyze and compare. It helped me make what I feel like is a more informed decision and I'm more comfortable than I was about moving forward.
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