The challenge
Ellie's Angels was built on a system one teenager made for herself.
After experiencing challenges with her mental health, Ellie, a teenager from Kent, began journaling her thoughts and feelings every day and writing positive notes of self-love to encourage her recovery. The charity founded in her name in 2021 set out to support other young people's mental wellbeing through the same practices: journaling, reflection and positive affirmation.
To reach those young people at scale, the system needed to become a product. The audience was teenagers facing personal struggles, depression and anxiety, most of whom would never meet Ellie or hear her story before opening the app.
That created a real design tension. Ellie's approach worked because it was hers, written in her own words and kept up day after day. An app built around it had to reflect how teenagers actually think and talk about their mental health, feel like a safe place to be honest, and make daily journaling something worth returning to.
The challenge was turning one person's coping routine into a product that thousands of teenagers would choose to keep using.
Our solution
We started with the charity's ten Youth Mental Health Ambassadors.
Across multiple workshops and engagement sessions, we explored how teenagers talk about mental wellbeing, which functions they would actually use and what would make the experience feel approachable. The ambassadors could judge something a design team can only guess at: whether a word, a feature or a tone would feel encouraging or patronising to someone their age.
That mattered because a wellbeing app for teenagers succeeds or fails on how it speaks. If it sounds clinical, it feels like homework. If it sounds forced, it is easy to dismiss. The research gave us the language young people use for their own wellbeing, and that language shaped the product from the start.
The second design problem was consistency. Ellie's system helped because she returned to it every day, and journaling and positive affirmation only build value through repetition. We designed better u around journaling, reflection and positive habit-building, keeping the experience simple, encouraging and easy to use so that coming back each day asks very little of the user.
We then designed and built better u as a mobile app, giving the charity a product it could put in front of young people well beyond its own network.
The result was an app shaped by the people it serves: personal in tone, simple to return to and ready to carry one teenager's system to thousands of others.
The outcome
Since launch, better u has been downloaded more than 7,000 times, and its use has extended well beyond the charity's own channels.
NHS departments now use the app to bridge the gap between young people presenting with difficulties and receiving professional care. For a teenager waiting for support, better u offers something practical to do in the meantime: a daily place to record how they feel and practise the kind of positive reflection Ellie used in her own recovery.
The NHS has also commissioned films to promote the app, putting better u in front of young people through health service channels.
Ellie's Angels now has a product that carries its founding idea far beyond one person. A charity founded in 2021 has a digital tool that thousands of young people have chosen to download and that health professionals use while young people wait for care.
The result is a personal coping system turned into a shared resource: shaped by young people, downloaded more than 7,000 times and used by NHS departments to support teenagers at the point where they are waiting for help.
