Client
Self Initiated
Year
2026
Duration
2 weeks
Stack
Figma
Deliverables
high-fidelity UI designs, interactive prototype, design system, onboarding flow, payment dashboard UI
The Problem
Professionals lose between five and fifteen and a half hours a week to email and messaging triage, a pattern that contributes to a global cost of one trillion dollars annually. The burden falls hardest on people without structural support to offload it — founders and solo professionals managing everything themselves — where lost productivity compounds into missed opportunities and a low-grade anxiety that follows them outside working hours. I designed an AI-powered assistant that reads across Slack, Gmail, and Outlook and eliminates that triage entirely.
Why Existing Tools Fail
Superhuman speeds up triage but doesn't remove the need to read most messages manually. Notion Mail offers a smarter interface but stays confined to a single channel. Neither works across multiple channels at once, and neither delivers real intelligence about what matters — just better organization of what already exists.
The Insight
Professionals aren't failing to manage their communication. They're being failed by tools that deliver everything and understand nothing.
The Opportunity
That insight reframed the brief: not another inbox, but an intelligent filter — one that reads across every channel a person uses and surfaces only what genuinely needs their attention. It set the principles for everything after: the product had to feel calm rather than overwhelming, intelligent rather than mechanical, and trustworthy enough that a user would rely on its judgment instead of falling back on checking everything themselves.
Structuring the Solution
I grounded the solution in three real scenarios — a founder juggling investors, clients, and a small team across email and Slack; a freelance designer managing five clients at once; a consultant fielding upwards of a hundred emails a day, most irrelevant to their immediate priorities. These informed a navigation structure built around three pillars: a daily brief, tools to act on messages directly, and a unified workspace bringing every connected source into one place. From there I mapped the full information architecture and user flow, from onboarding through to acting on an item in the brief, giving the product a clear structural logic before any screen was designed.
Design Approach
I started with a mood board to clarify the look and feel before committing to specific decisions, then moved into sketching to test layout ideas and interaction logic early. From there I built the design system, using variables in Figma for visual coherence across every screen, and moved into high-fidelity screens covering onboarding, the daily brief, workspace views for Gmail, Outlook, and Slack, and the message detail view.
The Outcome
The result is an AI-powered communication assistant that sits above existing tools and does what none of them do: tells the user exactly what needs their attention today, and nothing else.
What It Solves
Instead of opening four apps and spending the first hour of the day figuring out what to respond to, the user opens one screen. Three categories, clear hierarchy, and an AI that has already read everything. The user just acts.
Scope
As a self-directed concept project, this wasn't measured against live usage — but the system was built with the same rigor as a shipped product: 11 high-fidelity screens spanning onboarding, the daily brief, workspace views across three integrated channels, and message-level detail, all governed by a single design system.
Scope
This project is a complete, end-to-end response to a real and costly problem — strategic thinking, systems design, and visual craft applied with a clear point of view from start to finish, designed for a specific person rather than a general audience.