CO:CREATE / Sumi

I led design for Sumi, an AI booking assistant built on a trainable LLM. Tattoo artists customize Sumi to reflect their voice and process. Clients use a chatbot interface to make booking requests fine-tuned to each artist’s unique needs.

2024 - 2025

Years

Sr Product Designer

Role

Product Strategy, UI/UX, User Research

Scope

PROBLEM

No two artists book the same way — but every client expects clarity.

We needed to design an experience that was:

  1. Flexible enough to match individual workflows

  2. Equipped standardized fields to enable scalability

  3. Addressed pain points of email and Instagram booking processes, like manual DMs, missed inquiries, client drop-off, and burnout

SOLUTION

We designed Sumi as a customizable AI assistant that adapts to each artist’s unique booking flow. By guiding clients through structured, standardized inputs, we balanced personalization with scalable, reliable data.

To guide Sumi’s direction, I led a collaborative design thinking session focused on using AI to streamline a bulky booking process without compromising artist trust. We used Hopes and Fears mapping to surface artists’ concerns around autonomy and a pervasive lack of trust in the industry, followed by Hill Statements to align on a product vision that framed AI as an assistive tool—not a replacement.

“I don’t want AI pretending to be me — I want it to help me sound like me.”

We rapidly iterated on paper prototypes, involving product, engineering, and artist liaisons to test ideas early and often. This approach helped us shape a customizable assistant that artists could train to reflect their voice and workflow—balancing efficiency with creative integrity.

Sumi was trained on 100+ booking forms, enabling artists to describe their process conversationally while automatically converting their requirements into standardized backend fields for enhanced scalability.

Flexibility of input—through both chat and voice recordings—was essential to meet artists where they’re most comfortable.

Flexible Intake, Scalable Structure

Sumi transforms each artist’s booking requirements into a visually engaging flow that collects the right client info, fast.

By weaving in curated work samples and lightweight prompts, she keeps the experience streamlined while ensuring artists get everything they need.

Streamlined Intake

Friction-Aware Flow

Sumi is trained to handle tense booking moments - like requesting placement photos - with tact.

She clearly communicates when something is required by the artist, reducing delays and unnecessary negotiation, and improving the quality of requests.

Beta Outcomes

Since introducing Sumi, we’ve seen a 32% reduction in artist onboarding time.

While still in beta, early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with 64% of consulted artists indicating plans to fully transition their booking process to our platform at launch.