In a moment where AI tools are multiplying faster than companies can absorb them, founders, CEOs, and small teams face a paradox: more intelligence is available to them than ever before, yet most businesses still operate from scattered, contradictory, and inaccessible knowledge. Documents live in Notion, decisions exist only in someone’s memory, and the same information appears in five different versions across five different tools.
Working in partnership with NOAN (getnoan.com), an AI-native business platform built for founders and scaling companies, our capstone focused on two interrelated challenges: how to redesign the onboarding experience to accelerate user activation, and how to design a voice-first interface that makes NOAN accessible from anywhere, at any time.
Both challenges trace back to the same core insight: users must move from treating NOAN like other AI tools to understanding it as a company brain they can talk to. The work was oriented entirely around triggering that shift.
The approach was grounded in UX Research and Service Design principles, combining generative and evaluative methods to understand users, diagnose the current experience, prototype new solutions, and validate them through testing.
The NOAN web app, voice mobile and desktop agent design, was part of the Capstone project for Carnegie Mellon Portugal degree on UXUI Design and it comprised two different projects:
The redefinition of the complete onboarding for the main product—the desktop app— iterating through design research and AI prototyping.
And the design of a voice approach to the agent (NOAN) for a mobile IOS app and a desktop feature sitting on the Apple menu bar. The mobile solution featured an integration of Eleven Labs, while the desktop solution was developed to integrate Recall.ai.