The user who just wants to start
The company and product remain unnamed for confidentiality. Screens, interactions, and design decisions have been adapted to protect sensitive details while preserving the real design challenges and outcomes.
AI products often require knowledge new users don't have — especially around advanced configuration.
The goal wasn't to hide complexity. It was to help people start successfully before they needed to understand settings, customization, or control.
I worked across navigation, onboarding, and interaction patterns on desktop and mobile.
How do you make an AI product approachable without limiting what it can eventually become?
The first challenge wasn't advanced setup — it was helping users see where to enter the product.
Two audiences needed different things: guided starts versus full control from the outset. Equal emphasis on both paths created hesitation instead of clarity.
The interface had to signal the difference before users committed to a path.
Two primary actions at the top — before anything else.
Each primary action became a destination, not a feature. Clear position and hierarchy communicate intent before users need to understand the product's structure.
"Ask anything" — no decisions required.
Many AI products ask for important decisions before users have context to make them.
Advanced settings matter later — at the start, they often create hesitation rather than confidence.
Progressive disclosure let users start with a prompt while keeping configuration available when it became useful.
Personalization stays visible but optional — available before it's needed, without competing with the primary task.
Desktop lets users compare multiple AI responses side by side. Mobile removes that spatial advantage, but the task stays the same.
The question wasn't what to remove — it was how to preserve comparison and navigation in a much smaller space.
The interaction model was adapted to the device rather than copying the desktop layout.
A tab bar gives the user the freedom to select which response they want to review.
Consistency doesn't require identical layouts — the goal was to preserve the workflow, not mirror every element. Mobile needed its own spatial solution for the same user goal.
Less effort isn't always a better experience.
As conversations grew — more responses, more configuration, more at stake — accidental actions carried a higher cost.
The question was where speed should win and where certainty mattered more.
A confirmation step before an irreversible action. One extra click that protects permanent decisions.
For irreversible actions, confirmation creates confidence rather than interruption — one extra step that protects users from consequences they may not understand until it's too late.
Safety isn't friction.
It's confidence.
It was about helping people succeed before they understood every option — by removing unnecessary decisions and introducing complexity only when it became useful.