Hi! I'm Coen, A Licensed Mental Health Counselor now working in User Research.

Coen Thornton

I've worked in behavioral health, human services, and healthcare systems for years, coaching patients through challenging UI design and frustrating user flows before we could even start their therapeutic sessions. Working on the provider side of EHR systems, I have had to resolve and rework my clinical workflow many times, as well as coach other clinicians on how to best overhaul theirs for increased efficiency. This was my start in UX.

Now, I study technology and systems to help technologists build safe and effective solutions for patient care.

Some of my work includes:

Behavioral Health Website Conversion

A behavioral health nonprofit converted only 1.25% of its 4,000 monthly visitors into sessions, leaving a 79-session monthly gap. The site had expanded without intentional UX principles in place, particularly for issues like its information architecture, lack of clarity of the services offered, and the absence of helpful microcopy leading users through the page.

I used web analytics, behavioral health industry experience, internal reporting, and meetings with stakeholders to build a website prototype using website design and conversion funnel solutions. The prototypes were based around the brand guidelines and UX best practices related to conversion and usability — particularly Hick’s law and the Von Restorff effect.

This led to a shift in organizational priorities, reallocation of the budget to website-focused initiatives and away from generalized ad campaigns, and the start of more refined user research in the technological components of the organization.

Solid State Coffee Service Redesign

Secret shopper data showed the peak weekend wait times eclipsed 13 minutes. The line was always long and the service was slow no matter how hard they tried.

I found operational pain points through behavioral observation and contextual inquiry with employees and customers, plus neighborhood interviews.

My analysis led to a diagnosis of the service bottleneck, a redesign of the service process and a reassignment of roles across the organization.

This helped me better understand coordination of services, spatial constraints in service design, and change adoption. I want to apply these ideas to more complex problem spaces, such as behavioral health and healthcare, specifically for product adoption and physical deployments of technology solutions.

Some more projects, personal and professional:

  • A usability study for the NYC Ferry App, where 4 out of 5 participants could not plan their route, despite that being the primary task their mental model wanted the app to perform.
  • AI tooling for UX Research, job searching, consumer products research, and personal assistant implementation.
  • Homelab work: a file server, home automation, and local AI agents performing tool calls across my home network.
  • Simple websites as a planning resource for large family vacations.

If you are looking for someone who sits at the intersection of UX research, clinical mental health expertise, and AI in patient care — I would love to connect!