Approach & Process

Making a new AI tool for a very niche user base was challenging. 2025 was the year where there was a release of multiple AI tools and agents so designing a workspace which was unique and distinct was a big problem to overcome. Before jumping into the brief given by the AI/ML team, I had to use a bunch of other AI tools available which acted as a workspace for the users. This included tools like Notion, Genspark, Grok, Perplexity, ChatGPT etc, just to get a gist of what I had to work around with and how the information could be laid out for the user (exemplar screens used for primary study shown below)

Aim

A 'digital twin' of sorts who acts the same way as the user except proceeding forward with decisions (human-in-loop). Not just a note taker and task management application saas

Design and Development

We focused on building an interface that delivered both functionality with a sleek, minimalistic look. Since the target group is finance based, focus was bringing out numbers and statistics which make the necessary argument of moving forward with any kind of financial document. After talking with the CFO partners (partnered with the organization as consultants), following decisions were taken while designing:

• Streamlined Navigation: We structured the navigation to allow users to easily access product features. The elements of the navigation were decided upon discussing what would make their daily work efficient

• Visual Hierarchy: By introducing a clear typography system, we ensured that complex data was presented in a digestible manner.

• Consistent Brand Aesthetic: We integrated Hyperbots' branding into the design, using a cohesive color palette, brand icons and a new logo to show the complexity and thinking of HyperLM

User Personas and their pain points

1. Primary Persona: Chief Financial Officer

• Spending half of time on operational tasks vs. strategic planning

• Delayed decision-making due to information gathering overhead {mentioned by CFOs as well in expert calls}

• Risk of errors in manual processes affecting compliance

• Updates on tasks for today as well as emails 

• Prompt response to emails that come in 

• Templatised reporting and report creation

• Cash flow forecasting

2. Secondary Personas: VP Finance, Finance Director, etc

• Operational efficiency focus, process optimization, Team coordination, workflow management 

Visual Direction

• After talking with the CFO partners, the following tools were revealed, which were most used by them and their team, so the visual experience needed to be somewhat similar:
  - Google workspace (Gmail, Sheets, Slides, Docs and Calendar)
  - Notion
  - ChatGPT/Perplexity (about 80% of them use ChatGPT and the rest 20% use perplexity because of document parsing and research mode)
  - LinkedIn (For community, financial news, etc)
  - ERP tools (SAP, Oracle NetSuite, etc)
  [ All the tools listed above were used before Anthropic, Perplexity, etc other companies made AI specifically for finance needs ]

• Not straying away from the design system of Hyperbots Inc. The elements were not vastly different from the design system set up for the procure-to-pay tools, which proved the reusability of the design system to be powerful and efficient. Instead, a lighter variant of the Hyperbots blue was introduced for differentiating between the tow product offerings from the organization.

• A clean layout which is easier to user.

User flow

Since it was going to be a conversation based tool, the architecture was to be made very simple and not complex. The user flow is pretty simple;
User logs into Vera -> Onboarding of the user with few questions regarding their role -> Connecting Google/Microsoft suite -> Landing page where the user can directly converse with the assistant

Key Features

1. Finance Q&A -ask anything to the chatbot and an answer is generated in the context of F&A tasks, non F&A queries are gracefully declined. 

2. Financial Document Assistance Q&A

3. Email Assistance

4. Calendar Assistance

5. News and External Intelligence

6. Tasks for Today Section based on documents available, external news, email insights and calendar data

Initial ideas

The following pictures show the initial ideas which were ideated upon. These were scrapped because few were not just sitting right with our partners while others had a lot of cognitive load

Screens/ Key Views

Following few pictures depict the various use of Vera. For Beta launch, Document ingestion, Conversational AI and Email read were only made.