Hypnosis for pain relief
March 2025 – June 2025 · Senior Product Designer
Overview
Reveri is a clinical hypnosis app co-founded by Dr. David Spiegel, a renowned psychiatrist and hypnosis researcher at Stanford University. His work has shaped decades of research into how hypnosis can support pain, stress, and sleep. Still, the product experience was largely static: users selected a guided session and followed the same structure regardless of what they were feeling or how their pain showed up.
As product designer, I defined how conversational AI would fit into the existing Reveri experience, designing the interaction model, session experience, and new paths into care from Home. Rather than redesigning the product around AI, we narrowed the opportunity to one specific moment: helping users feel more heard and supported during pain relief sessions.
We introduced a conversational mode that could adapt in real time based on what users shared, while preserving Reveri's existing audio experience for those who preferred it.
Users who completed conversational sessions reported improvement at a higher rate: 87%, compared with 60% for the standard sessions, while also strengthening users' sense of being heard and understood.
Bringing the live experience into the product
Throughout the project, we kept coming back to one question: how could Reveri capture more of what made a live session with Dr. David Spiegel feel so effective?
The answer turned out to be simpler than redesigning the entire experience. By letting users describe their pain and preferences through voice, we could personalize the session around what they shared, something AI finally made possible at scale.
Reveri reinforced the importance of designing around the emotional context of an experience, not just the interaction itself. In a product built around pain relief, the goal wasn't to make the technology more visible, but to make the experience feel more responsive, personal, and human.
