Case Study: SynFit 0-to-1 MVP
Jennie M
SynFit 0-to-1 MVP — Designing an Adaptive, Accessible App for Stroke Recovery
Designed the foundational product architecture, accessible design system, and core user flows for a specialized digital health platform. The resulting MVP design and user validation data successfully helped the startup secure its next round of venture funding.
Overview, Role & Team
Mission: Syntrillo, a health tech startup founded by neurologists, aims to bridge the gap between hospital discharge and long-term stroke rehabilitation.
My Role: Product Designer leading end-to-end UX/UI, interaction design, and branding infrastructure.
Team: Cross-Functional Collaboration— small, agile team consisting of a UX Researcher, Illustrator, Chief Creative Officer, content creators, and engineering. Participated in weekly development feedback loops to ensure technical feasibility.
Tools: Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud.
The Problem
Stroke survivors continue to have physical, mental, and cognitive challenges after leaving the hospital and beyond what health insurance claims provide.
Solution: SynFit aims to help stroke survivors regain their physical, mental, and cognitive functions after stroke. A major goal is taking into account the challenges they face and simplifying their experience as much as possible. The less frustration, the better, and as much support as we can give within our specifications.
Syntrillo’s business goals: Launching Freemium plan available to all with limited features and a subscription plan. Aiming for the potential to partner with healthcare providers and insurance providers to provide free care for all survivors.
Research
Our research involved gathering feedback from stroke survivors in several Facebook groups, alongside insights from our team's neurologists. This helped us understand our target demographics and create relevant content aligned with our business goals.
We also launched a Circle community space to gauge user interest in the product and provide a program preview, running alongside the MVP app design. Juggling these projects posed a challenge due to resource limitations, leading to the eventual shutdown of the community. However, the participation and positive feedback received confirmed the demand for our service, providing valuable insights.
Low fidelity sketch of activity session.
User Flow Sketches & Wireframes
We went through multiple iterations before receiving the final content strategy and valuable insights from user feedback. With this input, I sketched the activity session workflow and low fidelity wireframes for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), understanding additional refinements would be necessary after user testing and further clarity on our business goals.
Design system and guidelines.
Design
Branding was one of the areas I helped to build up and I started there to set up colors, fonts and to begin adding brand elements. I was able to pull in some of the new illustration style and some new icons we had created.
Meditation exercise completes the user's session on this flow.
Prototype
Designing for Progress and Motivation
In collaboration with the development team via weekly check-ins and feedback loops, we visualized the app's structure, prioritizing features that would encourage daily activity and habit formation, informing the design of the Home dashboard.
Additional Choice and Control
Auto-save: Users can exit activities without losing progress.
Activity Feedback: Users can provide feedback after completing activities.
Favorites Library: Users can save favorite activities for easy access and repetition.
Home Dashboard serves as a central hub, displaying user progress broken down into “Phases, Modules, Days, and Activities.”
Calendar feature emphasizing the app's structure around daily activities.
Daily greeting motivates users with positive messages and highlights their day's accomplishments.
Activity Sessions include core functionality revolves around personalized and adaptive activity sessions:
Integrate with AI: tracking user progress and adjusting difficulty to promote a sense of accomplishment.
Personalized: users can complete activities non-linearly and request adaptations for difficulty levels.
Media: video, audio and/or written instructions, transcripts, equipment requirements, exercise GIFs, and audio meditations.
Outcomes
The feedback we got from our Stroke Survivors was invaluable. We were lucky enough to have a number of people from a few Facebook groups who were enthusiastic to take part in our research for this project.
Syntrillo secured $250K of additional funding for our efforts.
The current version app still maintains the overall structure and flow that I designed and it has only been released to a few alpha users at the time of this case study. Since then, the business model has evolved, requiring further work on the app from gained insights. The MVP has not been launched yet and I look forward to seeing the results from user testing.
“Jennie is the one who I can always trust to make sure every deliverable is thoroughly completed at the highest level. Her skillset is dynamic and includes leading designers from an idea to concept to product. She is a great teammate who is willing to see other's opinions and is constantly working to understand how to elicit open feedback from others. Jennie is very skilled with UI and has strengthened her skills with UX to become a very talented Product Designer. She can take a disorganized idea and turn it into an attractive and well thought out design. Jennie can adapt to teams with many different backgrounds, various cultures, and dynamic backgrounds.”
—Drew B., PsyD., Chief Creative Officer, Syntrillo
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Posted Jul 15, 2026
Led SynFit MVP design: product architecture, accessible design system, wireframes and prototype that helped secure follow-on funding.
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Timeline
Nov 1, 2021 - Nov 30, 2022
Clients
Syntrillo
