Evolve AI

• Extensive user research
• Defined digital strategy & roadmap
• Value proposition workshops
• Website design & Framer development
• Design first beta release
• Design product updates
• Branding
• Writing

In March 2024, Sentient Flow was founded with a clear goal: to develop AI Agents that communicate with believable, human-like personalities. I joined one month later as the founding designer, when the company was just four people in a Telegram group and a backend prototype. Over the next nine months, I led the end-to-end design of Evolve AI, a no-code Creator Suite that brings the backend’s Dynamics Engine to life through an intuitive interface. This system allowed users to build emotionally intelligent AI characters powered by sensory awareness, evolving relationships, and adaptive memory—designed for gaming, enterprise, education, and more. I conducted in-depth user research, designed 13+ core features, built a robust component system, and helped launch the beta product that secured $200K in pre-seed funding. I continued product work through January 2025, delivering two major feature updates and collaborating across design, engineering, and marketing.

To understand our target audience, I conducted one-on-one interviews with 7 users sourced from Discord communities tied to popular competitors like Inworld, ConvAI, and Character.ai. These participants included gamers, indie developers, and narrative designers. I asked about their goals, frustrations, and experiences using AI character platforms. The conversations revealed a consistent desire for characters that felt emotionally believable within fictional worlds, rather than producing generic LLM outputs. Many voiced frustration with emotionally erratic responses, a lack of behavioral transparency, and overly complex tools that hindered creativity.

In parallel, I conducted deep audits of Inworld, ConvAI, and Character.ai to understand how they structured customization, memory, and in-world behavior. While each had strengths—such as rich API access or expressive dialogue—none offered a cohesive balance between emotional realism, character control, and intuitive UX. This reinforced the need for a modular, visual-first interface in Evolve that let users fine-tune everything from sentiment control to relationship dynamics—without needing to code.

I led the architecture and design of the Evolve AI Creator Suite, a no-code platform where users could craft emotionally intelligent AI characters. The product ultimately included 13 core features, anchored in five foundational categories from the backend: Characteristics, Interactions, Aspirations, Mindset, and Capabilities. These categories were featured in the Character Editor, where users could define personality traits, goals, emotional states, relationships, and other definitions. A separate Knowledgebase allowed users to upload documents and share Contextual Lore across characters. Additional modules like Analytics, Integrations, and Settings gave users visibility into Character Performance, Security Management, and Integration controls.

To support scalability and efficient collaboration with engineering, I built the first version of our component library from scratch. This included UI components such as sidebar navigation, chat inputs, modals, tooltips, tab systems, and action cards—tailored to the specific behaviors of our platform. These assets were paired with handoff documentation and detailed specs. I ran three rounds of UI QA with the frontend team to ensure implementation matched design intent and visual polish.

To support the beta launch, I designed and built the Evolve AI marketing website in Framer—covering the hero, product positioning, feature highlights, and calls to action that introduced the Creator Suite to our first wave of users.

After the beta release, the company scaled rapidly, growing from a four-person startup to a team of fifteen. I helped onboard new engineers and I supported ongoing product updates while contributing to broader design system decisions.

The first major post-launch feature I led was the Discovery Page, which allowed users to browse and interact with AI Agents shared by others on the platform. Characters could be filtered by genre (e.g., Fantasy, Sci-Fi, History), popularity (Trending, Top, Most Active), and tags such as personality traits or voice style. Each listing included a mini character preview and a chat modal, allowing users to test interactions before diving into edits. The goal was to encourage community creativity and increase engagement across public characters.

To deepen interaction with AI characters, I led a major expansion of the chat system across the platform. This included a full Chat Page with support for message history, pinned conversations, multimedia sharing (images, files, GIFs), and voice input/output controls. I also designed a compact mini chat modal for the Character Editor, allowing users to test character responses in real time without breaking workflow. To support this, I introduced new components for notifications, toasts, and chat settings, ensuring consistency and usability across all chat interfaces.