Project overview
Ion is an an AI design tool built for makers and lean product teams, streamlining the design-to-dev workflow to produce components that could be directly used in the product. I joined during a pivotal shift toward agentic AI, wearing multiple hats across UX, systems, and research.
Spoke with 12+ designers, PMs, and founders to map mental models on AI-driven workflows
Designed agent-first user workflow over many iterations
Published 15+ new components to the team's design system
The pivot
Many creative tools follow a linear model where user enters a prompt, receives visual output, and manually move into another tool. The one-way interactions often result in fragmented workflows. Thus, we envisioned a space where makers and agents contribute in context, moving beyond just generation to collaborative workflows.
How do we dynamically involve AI to elevate the design process?
The importance of context + creative control in AI involved design
Two types of user with very different focus
Users are interested to use AI as a second brain.
What starts as a quick prompt often turns into a fight for accuracy.
Users want and need creative control.
User usually need to add some final touches before moving on.
Solution direction
How might we ….
showing the pivot direction and show the reason why
My contributions at a glance