Many career changers, students, and recent graduates struggle to find career opportunities, while businesses often lack the time and resources to source fresh talent. Kaie solves this by acting as an agentic AI career partner: it collects explorers’ skills, goals, and preferences through a conversational onboarding flow, then autonomously matches them to businesses and facilitates introductions over email. As a Product Designer at Kaie, I designed the end-to-end onboarding and profile experience that powers this matching system: from the AI chat-based signup to structured profile creation, ensuring explorers are fully ‘match-ready.’ My role included user experience research, ideation, mid- and hi-fi design, prototyping, and close collaboration with developers to translate these flows into development while aligning with the founders’ business goals.
Company:
Kaie
My Role:
Product Designer, UX Researcher
Year:
2025
Tools Used:
Figma, Notion
The Challenge
Kaie isn’t a traditional job board. The product goal was to make early-career opportunity discovery feel less transactional and more supportive, while still gathering the data required for accurate matching. The challenge was onboarding: we needed high-quality, high-signal profile information, but asking too much upfront increased fatigue and drop-off.
I owned the explorer side of the experience - owning research, flow design, UI, and handoff for onboarding and profile creation in collaboration with the founders, engineers, and one other product designer.
Exploration & Pivot
We started with a marketplace-style dashboard where users could browse opportunities and express interest. Through early feedback and product direction, we realized this model pulled Kaie toward the same "apply and wait" cycle we were trying to replace.
We scrapped the marketplace and shifted to an agentic approach: Kaie would handle matching automatically once we collected the right inputs. Users would gain control through a clear profile they could review and edit after onboarding.
Testing Two Approaches
To validate direction, we ran usability testing (around 15 sessions) across two onboarding formats: a conversational chat flow and a traditional form flow. Chat felt more human and trust-building but became tiring when it tried to collect everything at once. Forms felt faster and familiar but less personal. Across both, users consistently wanted clear progress indicators, fewer questions up front, and reassurance they could edit later.
The key insight: onboarding was doing two jobs at once and needed to be split.
The Solution & Results
The final solution was a two-part onboarding flow. Step 1 uses a lightweight conversational experience to create an account, build trust, and capture only essential information. Step 2 moves users into a structured, multi-step profile builder designed to collect higher-signal data for matching, with clear grouping, progress tracking, and editability built in. This separation reduced perceived length and gave users a clear mental model: sign up quickly now, complete your profile with confidence next.
After shipping, onboarding completion improved by 22% (based on team tracking), and the flow established a scalable foundation for future iteration on matching quality.
