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Tommaso Rota's logo

Builder.ai

app-building platform
Project overview
Builder.ai is a startup in London. Builder Studio, their core product, is an AI-powered platform that aims to enable anyone to make an app from scratch.
The user is taken through feature selection, design and delivery, and a dedicated team of project managers and developers take care of the rest.
Builder Studio wasn't performing well, so a new design team was established in order to address the issues of the existing product.
My ROLE
I was the lead designer on Builder Studio, in a team of around 10 designers between the UK and India reporting to the head of design Tom Fenby.
In an agile environment, I was involved in everything from day-to-day meetings to ad-hoc stakeholder workshops and presentations.
The first step was looking at the data to identify friction.
I then mapped the existing flows and performed a UI audit.
Unclear messaging, unnecessary steps and an inconsistent UI with poor accessibility hindered the experience.
We started revamping the platform from its core, the features page.
We streamlined the interface with patterns built around best practice, testing and iteration.
Builder Studio users relied on product experts to help them with feature selection and every subsequent step, so we introduced a virtual assistant to facilitate the process and offload resources.
Next we worked on the landing page, where users start by selecting templates.
We wanted the AI to assist the user at every step so we made it the primary journey on this page, also considering that brand-wise Natasha had become the face of the product.
The goal was for the assistant to eventually replace user template selection: users would just have to input their idea and the assistant would compile a set of features to be refined in the next step.
However, as a first step we remained closer to the original experience: for now Natasha would just act as a template filter.
It was now time to work on delivery and payment, which in the flow come after feature selection.
Friction was reduced by streamlining navigation, consolidating steps and adopting a tried and tested ecommerce page layout.
Before I left I also put down the IA for the home hub, which when ready would substitute the templates page as the start of the app-building process.
This page would also act as a management centre to track project progress and stay in touch with the team.
It took a while to get there since we had to establish proper design methodologies first, but eventually we managed to redesign the whole primary journey.
At the time of writing this, the new Builder Studio is being tested as a beta.
During this long contract I contributed to many other products within the Builder family, such as the cloud, the rapid prototyping and the backend platforms as well as the overarching design system.
"Tommaso is a highly skilled, multi disciplined product designer — one of the most thorough I’ve had the pleasure to work with. From inception to delivery he demonstrated an attention to detail which truly makes the difference when crafting best in class experiences."
Tom Fenby - Design director at builder.ai

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