Overview
Joining Aitomatic Inc. as the Founding Product Designer, I owned the design of K1st BUILD, a platform that empowers manufacturing companies to create AI models from domain knowledge, help reducing the time and errors when developing AI models.
Problem Statement
The manufacturing sector faced a critical loss of heuristic / experiential knowledge due to retiring experts, coupled with the slow, error-prone process of data accumulation. We started K1st BUILD to capture the knowledge, translate it into structured knowledge and build AI models from that.
Design Process
1. Discover
I collaborated with the Head of Product and Sales team to narrow our targeted customers to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and big corporations in Metals, Materials, Oil & Gas industries.
Our buyers were VPs of Data Science or Director of AI & ML while our users were AI Engineers and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) with domain expertise.
I interviewed AI Engineers and SMEs to understand their workflows and built user personas, JTBDs, and user journeys. After verifying findings within Product and Sales team, I moved towards solutions focusing on user habits and expectations.
2. Define
We had two user personas to serve at once: AI Engineer and Subject Matter Expert. The platform needs to be efficient for the engineers to capture knowledge and tranform it into a model while stay simple enough for a SME to verify the knowledge inside the models, and at large, the system.
I validated the personas and workflows with the AI engineers inside and outside Aitomatic, with the experts from various domain. After a while, we chose the use case of Predictive Maintenance to progress as it contains most of general patterns from other use cases.
3. Design
When we were aligned on the user personas, the touchpoints on the workflow journeys, I created quick prototypes to get more feedback from the team. I also conducted 1:1 customer feedback for the interactive prototypes.
4. Deliver
As we need to move fast after getting the validation on the prototype, I helped the frontend engineer with testing after transferring the design. After 3 months of joining Aitomatic, I created the design system of K1st BUILD, with solid understanding of interactions and user expectations from the app.
Outcome
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Launch Success: Successfully introduced K1st BUILD at the K1st World Symposium at Stanford, receiving positive feedback from AI thought leaders and executives.
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Strategic Impact: Defined the design process and product design standards for design maturity of Aitomatic.
Conclusion
The journey with K1st BUILD helped me learn a lot in making advanced technology accessible and usable. It also was a remarkable experience to build a design culture from the ground up in a tech-centric company.