AI + Employee Experience
AI Buddy
HR Onboarding
Designing AI and employee experiences for a global pharmaceutical organization.
Leading experience strategy and design across both initiatives, bringing a human-centered approach to emerging AI and mobile technology.
The challenge
Takeda needed modern, intuitive experiences to support both lab scientists and new employees, within the constraints of existing systems and technologies.
I led two parallel initiatives at once, managing a small team while keeping both grounded in real user needs.
Human-centered design helps people do life-changing work.
Research
I grounded both initiatives in research with their real users. For the AI assistant, usability testing with lab scientists surfaced how much trust depended on data and output accuracy.
For onboarding, I mapped the new-employee journey to find where the existing process broke down, then designed around those moments.
AI Buddy
AI Buddy was a virtual lab assistant for scientists. Usability testing showed how completely user trust depended on data and output accuracy: people cross-checked answers elsewhere and gave up when the system got it wrong.
I designed the experience around transparency and trust first, then built it to scale across other teams such as compliance, technology, and marketing.
HR Onboarding
A mobile-first, guided onboarding journey, not a checklist, built on OutSystems low-code with Workday HRIS integration.
Role-based paths and reusable UI components let it scale across teams and regions. It went from v0 to production, including a mid-project pivot when Covid changed how people started work, and piloted with HR Canada.
Impact
Two shipped, human-centered experiences that met scientists and new employees where they were, and set a pattern the organization could reuse.
What I learned
With AI, trust is the interface. If people can’t rely on the output, the cleverness of the design does not matter.
Process
This is the process behind Takeda HR Onboarding. Much of the reusable research and design approach here also fed the AI Buddy initiative on the same account.
Initial concept
Workshops and interviews revealed a key insight: onboarding needed to work as a guided journey, not just a checklist. Tasks had to adapt to role, timing, and completion state; managers needed visibility without added work; and HR needed to define the structure once and reuse it across the org.
Final
One experience, built for everyone. The solution evolved through close collaboration with engineering and business owners, built on OutSystems low-code with Workday integration. Platform constraints shaped decisions: a custom map view was not maintainable in low-code, so I designed within the environment rather than around it.
A curated selection of the HR Onboarding designs.
A guided journey, not a checklist. The research insight drove everything: tasks that adapt to role, timing, and state.
Design within the platform. OutSystems made custom UI hard to maintain, so I worked within its constraints rather than fighting them.
“Technology should make life more human, not more complicated.”— Veronica Clarke
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