Overview

First stage development of an AI product.

Pre-seed to seed stage start-up aiming to create a B2B AI powered system designed to help accountants and businesses manage their financials seamlessly under one roof.

Key Contributions

(1) Oversight and curation of a scalable brand to support fundraising efforts now and market sales later.
(2) Research to uncover our highest risk assumptions and validate them.
(3) Working with stakeholders to create rapid lean designs for MVP.

(4) Scout, hire & manage external design partners

Role

Head of Design

Tools

Figma, Framer, Slack

Company and Year

Alexion.ai | 2025

The Problem

  • We quickly needed a Brand that was versatile and could appeal to distinct and the widely different audiences of investors and our early adopter end users.

  • Our leadership team needed help to identify some blind spots and help to mitigate their high risk assumptions. Specifically, we had some misalignment on who our target MVP user was and some key assumptions about what their biggest problem was to solve.

  • The Dev team needed user experience deign thinking input as they sprinted to create a rapid workable prototype.

Opportunities

  • Create a Brand that had foresight for scalability and could adapt as we grew.

  • Gather insight into our assumptions by talking to our beta users to help steer us towards success.

  • To ensure our rapid product building didn't sacrifice usability for speed of delivery

The Process

Discovery & Stakeholder Alignment

  • Development of a Brand Identify in partnership with leadership.

    • Guiding leadership to land on a clear brand story, purpose, character and message. Keeping our users in mind I urged us to tell a story of a future in which technology is integrated into the human world in a way that is safe, reliable, unobtrusive and centering human experience.

      • Created an early visual tonal guideline via mood board to support the communication with our external design agency in oversight of the Brand Guidelines.

  • Provisional User Personas helped us to have company wide alignment on who and what we were aiming for with our MVP.

  • Getting business and stakeholder input early and often

    • involving all departments throughout the process to assure UX prioritized the right objectives

  • Primary Research

    • Map mental models and user expectations through one-on-one user interviews

    • Card Sorting & Tree Testing (moderated and unmoderated hybrid)

  • Secondary research

    • User personas and journeys to re-familiarize our team with who we are building for

    • Competitive Analysis and detailed best practice anhigh level solution suggestions

  • Led a cross-functional assumptions matrix workshop with product, engineering, and leadership teams to identify areas of highest risk.

    • We prioritized highest risk assumptions related to:

      • How much trust users were willing to place in an AI-driven system.

      • Expectations around automation vs. control.

      • Delivery of MVP as a Slack integration.

      • Consideration about our focus on solving the problem of onboarding new clients for accountants and firms is the largest and most fruitful area of opportunity in the given problem space.

Early Design Exploration

  • Designing an AI interface with a few guiding principals in mind:

    • Mimicking familiar tools provides a comfortable and intuitive experience.

    • Minimizing the learning curve with pre built examples and low friction onboarding.

    • Minimal design with strong hierarchy, clear visual feedback and total user control.

  • Using low/ medium fidelity UX wireframes to explore with leadership the possibility of allowing users to choose from three different levels of AI interface; as assistant, as invisible software, and as friendly personality.

Hey there. Would you like to see more examples of my work? Let's talk.

Hey there. Would you like to see more examples of
my work? Let's talk.

Hey there. Would you like to see more examples of my work?
Let's talk.

Solutions and Next Steps

Solutions and Next Steps

  • Working with external vendors, I guided the development of a working set of brand guidelines and subsequent application of that brand for our investor pitch deck.

  • Next the dev team built a working minimal product to release to our early beta testers.

  • I planned and conduct research, one-on-one interviews and competitive analysis to verify our assumptions and guide the direction of our post MVP improvements.

Solutions and Next Steps

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Lydia Deerheart 2026