Crate — Designing AI Evolution
The Team
• 1-2 Designers
• 2 Product Team
• 1-3 Engineers
My Role: Founding Designer
Responsibilities: Leading the 5-year design evolution of Crate from a reactive bookmarking utility to a proactive AI discovery platform, including designing B2C and B2B products for both Mobile and Desktop, creating and maintaining style and symbol libraries, creating animated and static marketing materials, and everything in between.
The product
Crate is an AI-powered discovery and personalization product for internet-native users who save, explore, and build taste across the web. It learns from user-consented signals and saved content to generate a living Taste ID, then uses that to power a visual, editorial home feed.
The Opportunity
Designing a product from day one is a fun puzzle. Redesigning it while the market shifts, technology explodes, and the business model pivots? That’s an entirely different kind of challenge, still fun though.
Over five years as the founding designer at Crate, I led the product’s visual and functional evolution from a reactive utility app (saving your links) to a proactive AI discovery engine (understanding your taste). This is the story of how we navigated a massive pivot without losing our users, turning a simple digital locker into an intelligent, welcoming platform.
Act 1
It Started with Saving
In the beginning, Crate was built to solve a simple problem: digital hoarding. We all save links, articles, and inspiration, and we never look at them again.
I designed the V1 of Crate to be a frictionless, clean utility. The goal was to make saving and organizing as effortless as possible.
To complete the experience we've developed a responsive web version of the app, and a browser plug-in allowing saving anything straight to the app.
It worked, and users liked it. But as we dug into the data and market research, we hit a wall. We realized that "saving" alone just wasn't a strong enough signal to keep people coming back. We needed to offer more value.
Act 2
The Pivot
We realized we were sitting on a goldmine of intent. If we knew what people were saving, we could predict what they actually wanted to discover.
Right around this time, emerging AI technologies became far more accessible and cost-effective. We saw an opportunity to completely flip the script: instead of Crate being a place where you store things, what if Crate became an intelligent agent that finds things for you based on your unique "Taste ID"?
We weren't just a saving app anymore. We were an AI discovery platform!
This meant going back to the drawing board. As the lead designer, I had to figure out how to completely change the app's core engine without alienating the users who were already using it.
Addendum:
In the meantime, we were experimenting, learning, and improving in the process. Here are some of the experiments we did.
B2B tool for Bloggers, allowing them to track the engagement, and generate content using AI
B2B tool for Bloggers, example of UI