AI for Quality & Manufacturing
An AI-powered compliance platform that helps regulated manufacturers automate batch review, deviation investigations, and quality reporting across the documents and systems they already run.
Role: Lead UX Designer, full product design (solo, first designer on the product) Client: Litewave AI, an early-stage startup
TimeBox: October 2024 to present, ongoing engagement
Tools: Figma, FigJam, Figma Make, Framer, Miro, Confluence, Notion, Jira, Slack
Design Challenge
Litewave AI serves regulated manufacturers across pharma and biotech, food and beverage, dietary supplements, and cosmetics. Releasing a batch without a rigorous check in place risks serious consequences: FDA Form 483 observation letters, failed audits, or a full batch recall, each with real financial and supply chain fallout. Design a complete AI-assisted quality system: a review workflow that replaces manual, paper-based batch checks with something QA teams can trust and complete faster, a summary view that gives QA Managers what they need to approve or reject a batch, and reporting dashboards that give executives clear visibility into quality trends and outcomes across the business, all without sacrificing the accuracy these industries depend on.
Design Opportunity
Litewave AI was a brand new startup, founded in October 2024, with no existing product or design system to build from. My work focused on the pharmaceutical manufacturing vertical, where QA teams were still cross-checking paper records, handwritten observations, and machine data by hand, a process that could take several hours per batch and still caught well under half of all errors. This blank slate moment opened the door to design the entire review and release experience from the ground up.
Target Users
QA Reviewers and QA Managers at pharmaceutical manufacturers, the two roles responsible for verifying and releasing every batch before it reaches the market. Reviewers need to catch errors across paper records, handwriting, and machine data quickly and accurately, without missing the majority of issues the way manual review did. Managers need full visibility into every issue as it happens, so they can operate audit-ready at all times and sign off with confidence, instead of being blindsided during an audit. That same data also serves executives and upper management, who need a clear, high-level view of quality trends and outcomes across the business.
The Solution
The solution is a fully guided online living trust platform: sign up, work through a step-by-step intake wizard covering beneficiaries, trustees, guardians, and power of attorney, schedule a real attorney meeting, then review and e-notarize your finished documents, all without leaving home. Complex legal decisions are broken into simple, manageable steps, with a built-in notes panel so questions never get lost. The overall goal is to make estate planning feel as reassuring and personal online as it would sitting across from an attorney in person.
Features
Intake Wizard
Users are guided step-by-step through beneficiaries, trustees, guardians, and power of attorney, turning a complex legal process into simple, manageable screens.
Notes Panel
Users can jot down questions as they go, so nothing gets forgotten before the attorney meeting.
Attorney Scheduling
Users can book a real meeting with a licensed attorney directly from the platform to review their choices before finalizing documents.
Document Review & E-Notarization
Users can review their completed documents and e-notarize them online, completing the entire process without an in-person visit.
Process
I sat down with the attorney behind the platform to understand the full living trust process firsthand, then ran a few brainstorming sessions to work through where the process broke down for clients. That research became a journey map, tracing the client's path from sign-up to notarized documents and surfacing the pain points along the way. From there, I built a flowchart of the intake wizard's logic, including the extra steps that appear automatically if someone is married or has children, without adding friction for everyone else.
Journey Map
Flowchart
Design Exploration
Before landing on the final direction, I sketched an early wireframe for the homepage, then pushed it into a higher-fidelity concept to test tone and messaging with the attorney.
The Flow in Action
These are the actual screens from the live platform, shown in the order a client moves through them: sign up, enter their information, pay the plan fee, then complete the wizard steps like executors and powers of attorney. They can schedule a real meeting with the attorney at any point along the way, and once everything is signed and notarized, every document lands in one library they can come back to anytime.
Post-Launch Refinements
Once the platform launched, real use by the attorney and early clients surfaced a couple of usability gaps that got fixed quickly. The document checklist originally showed each document as a small thumbnail image, but as more document types were added, the thumbnails stopped fitting cleanly on screen; that was replaced with a simple list and checkboxes instead. Clients also had no single place to view their documents once notarized, so a documents library was added afterwards, giving them one place to access every signed file.
Takeaways
This project pushed me to design for real stakes, not hypothetical ones. Estate planning touches some of the most personal decisions someone will make, like who raises their kids, who manages their money, and what happens after they're gone. Turning that into a guided online experience meant balancing warmth and reassurance with the precision a legal process demands, and doing it alongside a practicing attorney instead of a stand-in client.
Show people it can really be done online. Trusting a legal process to a website is a big ask, so we added a short video on the landing page walking through how the whole thing works, start to finish. Seeing the process laid out helped people believe it before they ever created an account.
Make expert help easy to reach. Even with a guided wizard, people still had real questions before they were ready to commit. We added a phone number right on the site so anyone could call and talk to the attorney directly and get their questions answered before signing up.
Design for real constraints, not ideal ones. I wasn't starting from a blank slate. There was an existing brand, a live business, and a legal process that couldn't just be simplified away. The best solutions came from working within those boundaries: reusing what already worked, fixing what broke once real users hit it, like the document checklist that stopped scaling, and adding what was missing once it became obvious in practice, like the documents library. Shipping something real and then improving it with real feedback taught me more than getting every decision perfect upfront ever could have.
Thanks for reading!
