Starting a business is supposed to be about the idea.
The vision. The risk worth taking. Instead, for business owners in this state, it meant weeks of fragmented research across a dozen agency websites, phone calls to offices that may or may not have the answer, forms filled out wrong, fines for licenses nobody told them they needed, and a creeping suspicion that the system wasn't built for them. It wasn't. It had never been designed at all.
This project set out to change that — a greenfield, AI-powered platform that would consolidate every requirement, permit, regulation, and license across state agencies into a single, personalized experience for business owners. A one-stop portal built on a simple promise: we did the work so you don't have to.
Building it required designing three interconnected things simultaneously. A content-driven public website. A wizard experience that asked business owners the right questions to generate a personalized compliance checklist. And an entirely new internal governance platform for state agency administrators — a role and a workflow that had never existed before.
As Design Principal, I led the full effort — design partner Jessie Betz and I owned the experience end to end, with in-house visual designer Nahin Shah joining to lead the branding track. Three streams running in parallel, converging into one product.
Starting with the landscape, not the screen
The project opened with volumes of agency documentation — regulatory language, existing site content, disconnected processes across a dozen departments. Rather than digest that manually, we leaned on AI tools early and aggressively: to synthesize documentation, surface patterns, and get the team oriented in the landscape faster than a purely manual read-through ever could. That early synthesis gave us a foundation to design against from week one, instead of spending the first month just making sense of what we'd inherited.
Alongside that, a dedicated research stream ran AI-accelerated studies on both sides of the platform — customer-facing and admin-facing — digging into user needs, pain points, and goals for people trying to navigate business compliance, and for the administrators who'd eventually manage it. AI made the research move fast: consolidating findings, surfacing trends, extracting insight at a pace that would have taken weeks by hand. But speed wasn't the whole story. The tools could tell us what the data said; they couldn't sit across from a business owner and understand why it mattered to them, or carry that weight into a design decision. That tension — AI for velocity, human presence for meaning — became one of the clearest lessons of the project, and it shaped how we used AI everywhere else on the engagement.
A branding process, proven for the third time
Branding hadn't been scoped into the original project — an early gap the team recognized needed real attention. We brought Nahin Shah on to lead it, running the same branding process I'd developed on the Lincoln Unlocked museum project and carried into the B2B2C wholesale distributor app. This was the third time that process had been put into practice, and it held up: a repeatable way to take a team from an undefined brand — in this case, an entire state agency's public-facing identity — to a resolved visual language.
Nahin and Jessie ran the branding track together under my guidance, exploring visual direction using Gemini and Midjourney — Gemini for prompt refinement and color exploration, Midjourney for generating and pressure-testing visual directions — while intentionally testing a range of AI tools along the way to see what actually earned a place in the workflow. That track ran in parallel with the rest of delivery, not blocking it, and folded back into the core product once the visual language was resolved — a genuinely rewarding moment where brand, research, and experience finally came together as one product.
The problem nobody had solved yet
The AI at the center of this platform pulls from the same agency sources that business owners have always had to navigate themselves. It consolidates that content and presents it for human review and approval before it ever reaches a business owner. The administrators — representatives from each state agency — are the human in the loop. The trust layer between AI-generated content and a business owner making a real decision about their livelihood.
But these administrators had never done this before. There was no existing workflow, no existing role, no existing mental model to design toward. We were building it with them, through research, co-design sessions, and continuous feedback loops. Every decision had to balance two competing needs: rigor enough to ensure accuracy, and simplicity enough that administrators could get in, get going, and get out. A quagmire of an admin experience would undermine the entire trust architecture of the platform.
Designing at the speed of AI, with the judgment of a human
While branding and research ran their tracks, the core delivery stream moved on skeletal UX — early structural design work that let the team keep pace even as the visual language was still resolving. As product requirements came through prioritization, we developed a rhythm for turning them into design: UX Pilot for breadth, generating a wide scatter of directional variants fast, then Figma for depth — picking those explorations apart, applying craft, and bringing in the judgment no AI tool has. I think of that second phase as the humanification step: the place where a generated skeleton becomes something that actually respects the person using it.
Early in the project, that filtering was directly informed by the research stream — direction, feedback, and iteration in a tight loop. Once that research wing wound down, the filtering became more intuition-led. But that intuition was never starting from zero. The early research had built a foundation of understanding — what business owners and administrators actually needed, where the real friction lived — and every downstream decision, even the ones made on instinct months later, was still built on that ground. That's the part of the craft I keep coming back to: intuition isn't a substitute for understanding, it's what understanding turns into once it's internalized. Leveraging your grasp of the landscape, then applying the tools of your craft, in service of real value for the person on the other end of the product — that's the whole job.
Leading across the full spectrum
I owned the design of everything on this project — the public website, the wizard, the checklist, the administrator platform — while managing Jessie Betz and Nahin Shah across research, delivery, and branding. I was also the primary design voice in a fixed-bid engagement, which means communication with the Product Manager wasn't just important, it was the mechanism by which the entire project stayed healthy. Fixed-bid projects punish ambiguity. I became deliberate, almost surgical, about how I presented design decisions — always anchored to intent, always connected to the problem we agreed we were solving, always leaving the PM with clarity rather than questions.
At the same time I was operating at delivery altitude, I was holding the long-term strategic view — how does this platform scale as more agencies come on board? How does the administrator experience evolve as the AI gets better? How do we design a content architecture flexible enough to handle the full complexity of state government without collapsing under its own weight?
That's the work. All of it, at once, every day.
What this project taught me
There's a version of government digital experience that earns trust by being competent. Clear, accurate, fast. That's the floor. What we're building reaches for something higher — a platform that treats a business owner's time, confusion, and anxiety as design inputs as important as any technical requirement. When someone gets their personalized checklist and feels confident rather than overwhelmed — that's not a feature. That's the mission.
And it's also where I sharpened something I now carry into every AI-augmented project since: AI is extraordinary at breadth, synthesis, and speed. It is not a substitute for sitting with a person and understanding what they're going through, and it's not a substitute for the judgment that turns research into a decision. The best work happens in the handoff between the two — AI clearing the ground fast enough that the humans on the team can spend their time where it actually matters.
I don't show up in big bang moments. I show up consistently. I show up relentlessly. I show up because I care deeply. My team knows that on the days I'm buried in meetings, on the days everything is piling up, on the days I probably should have taken off — I have their backs completely. Every question gets my full attention. Every designer on my team knows I'm in their corner.
That consistency is the only way to hold work this complex without dropping something. Each day, each moment, each choice builds toward the thing you're trying to make.
You just have to keep showing up.