Rachel Ilan Simpson
Rachel is the Founder of Ilan Studio, an independent studio partner for startups and tech companies. After spending 8 years building Chrome and Search at Google, she scaled UX from 4–20 people as Director of UX at Multiverse, and built 0-1 as founding designer at software generation startup Tessl. Her clients and collaborators include Microsoft AI Health, Geordie.ai, Freeletics, Seth Godin, BMW, Euki, and Doctors without Borders.
Designing for AI-powered Products, with Joy and Purpose
Most conversations about AI in design happen at 1,000 feet — they feel speculative, polarized, and future-focused. Those conversations matter, but they can also make AI feel more frightening and unknowable than it really is. In practice, designers are already making daily, concrete decisions about how AI behaves in products. Like every major technology shift, the real risks and opportunities live in the details.
This talk takes a practical view of AI product work today. Rachel will share hands-on lessons from both early-stage startups and large tech teams where she's worked over the last year, focusing on interaction patterns, trust signals, system boundaries, and workflows that help AI-powered products feel coherent and well-crafted rather than chaotic or over-constrained. She'll share what surprised her and what she learned when it comes to making the most of these technologies for users.
A central thread is how her prototyping approach changed: using AI-enabled tools like Lovable to build living, interactive prototypes instead of static mocks. She'll walk through a 0→1 concept she prototyped this way across six months and multiple funding stages, where it worked, where it didn't, and what surprised her. She'll contrast this with mock-driven workflows, rapid AI-assisted website prototyping, and rebuilding a large-product experience connected to a prototype database to explore interactions for a scaled product, safely.
Expect real artifacts (where possible), practical methods, and immediately usable techniques — not future talk, but sleeves-rolled-up design practice.
- On the web
- https://www.rachelilansimpson.com/
- On LinkedIn
- rachelilan