The context
NEXT Inc was a very early-stage start-up with a passion for helping small business owners who are non-tech-savvy to have a digital presence. I was their first and only product designer, helping them create and shape the product. Our goal was to build a product that is intuitive and helpful, especially for people who are intimidated by regular software.
Working without a map
NEXT was as early-stage as startups get: a CEO, a CTO, one front-end developer, and me. There was no structure to inherit, no processes, no design culture. I had full authority to shape how design worked, which sounds like freedom but often meant building the road while driving on it. Everything moved fast: launch the MVP, then feature after feature. My design decisions had to hold up without a researcher, without a design team, and without time for second passes.
Starting without a blank page
“Train your AI” is developer language. For a business owner, it’s an empty box with no obvious starting point. So the design offers ways to begin without writing from scratch: drop in a URL and the platform fetches the material itself, write plain-text instructions, or start from Bot Introduction, a generated baseline to react to, because editing is always easier than a blank page.
Three ways to start: fetch from a URL, write plain instructions, or edit a generated baseline.
Live edits on the left, results on the right. “Try your chatbot” tests the real conversation before launch.
See it before your customers do
Every change shows its result instantly. The live edit panel updates the chatbot as owners adjust it, in Widget or Chatbot view (the chat’s closed bubble and open window). Beyond appearance, they shape the conversation itself: customized first message and optional email or phone collection, because nobody knows their customers better. Then “Try your chatbot” closes the loop: they talk to their own bot exactly as their users will, and fix what’s off before going live.
From chatbot to full digital presence
User feedback showed a chatbot alone wasn’t enough, and owners wanted a fuller digital presence. So the next product was a website builder that opens with the site already generated from the material they’d uploaded to train their chatbot, with the trained chatbot embedded and working from day one. They edit something real instead of starting from scratch. The builder works in prebuilt template blocks: add, remove, or reorder sections, with a side panel showing exactly what each element can change and inline text editing. Advanced options like Google Analytics and SEO stay tucked away in more settings, there for owners who want them and invisible to those who’d find them overwhelming. I ran usability testing and iterated through several rounds.
The site arrives already built from their chatbot material, with the chatbot embedded from day one.
What happened
The chatbot builder found early traction, particularly within the Chinese small business community. After the website builder launched, NEXT’s user base grew 45%.
What this changed in how I work
A year as the only designer taught me both sides of autonomy. I could shape workflows and own every decision end to end, but no one was there to challenge my thinking. No critique, no design peers, no one to catch what I couldn’t see. I learned to build my own feedback loops instead: usability testing, developer input, user feedback. And I learned something about my best work: it needs other designers around it. That lesson is a big part of why my next step is a design team.
