Discoverability in an AI assistant
2025 - 2026
91% of users who saw the AI never sent a prompt. I designed the onboarding and empty state experience that shows them what to ask. Prompt engagement rose 13.5% and climbing.
Mobile Product Designer Lead
Role
Software Engineer, Product Manager, Content Designer, UX Researcher, Data Scientist
Team
QuickBooks mobile App on iOS & Android
Product area
The impact
Prompt engagement up 13.5% and climbing.
The challenges
At mobile launch, I designed a new bottom nav entry and added a homepage tooltip to announce the assistant.
Awareness ≠ understanding
Users came, but almost none of them sent a prompt. Dropped in with no guidance, most mistook the assistant for a help bot and left without learning what it could do.
New bottom navigation
Homepage tooltip
The blank box with no guidance
The brief
My PM handed me the web onboarding design and asked me to bring it to mobile with the same data. But what I was looking at was actually an empty state. The distinction matters.
Onboarding teaches once and disappears, while an empty state guides every visit but never tells the bigger story.
Neither alone would fix the drop-off, so I made the case to design both.
The solutions
1. A unified Onboarding + Empty state
Onboarding answers why. The empty state answers what. Each screen progressively builds understanding, so by the time users type their first prompt, they already know what this AI can do for them.
Before
91% of users who saw it never sent a prompt
Dropped in with no guidance, most users mistook the assistant for a help bot, and never found out what it could actually do.
After
Setting realistic expectations
Animated onboarding demonstrates what the AI can do, turning users' first interaction into a hands-on tutorial for effective AI use.
Enabling quick starts
Insight paired with a suggested action creates personalized prompts, a starting point drawn from the user's own books, not a blank box.
2. Consolidated insight + prompt
On web, insight and prompt were separate; a small screen has no room for that. I pushed our data analysts to merge them: "Summarize my 8 unpaid invoices." The reason to ask is embedded in the ask. Web later adopted the pattern.
Before
Original design separated insight and prompt, hard to read and take action.
After
Consolidated one line prompt tells both the insight and the prompt.
The impact
Prompt engagement up 13.5% and climbing.
The blank-box problem didn't disappear, it became a smaller front door with better signage.