Project Overview
Problem
Senior living operators were overwhelmed by misaligned leads due to customers lacking access to up-to-date information about senior living options.
Solution
An AI-powered chatbot that proactively guides users through their decision-making journey, offering context-aware answers
Impact
Better informed customers create more informed leads, reducing call center strain, increasing direct bookings, and enabling scalable content refinement.
Key Product Features
AI-Powered Chatbot for a Smoother Search Experience
Choosing a senior living community is often an emotionally complex and logistically challenging process. Our solution helps ease that burden by offering proactive, personalized guidance, supporting users with relevant answers and next steps throughout their journey.
Proactive Engagement
Surfaces timely Q&As based on user behavior and page context, offering help before users feel overwhelmed or lost.
Contextual Conversations
Uses natural language processing to understand intent and deliver tailored responses, accelerating the search with clear, relevant information.
Decision Progression
Reinforces decision-making by highlighting key considerations and gently prompting users toward the next best step.
My Role
Led Cross-Functional Alignment to Accelerate Progress
Facilitated collaboration across product, content, and engineering to realign around a shared direction—breaking through ambiguity and unblocking stalled development.
Directed a Ground-Up Redesign to Sharpen Focus
Led a complete redesign to reduce decision fatigue by pacing information, simplifying entry points, and surfacing timely next steps, resulting in a more intuitive, user-centered experience.
Balanced Empathy with Business Goals
Designed a flow that supports users in their decision-making journey while driving conversions—guiding them with empathy through key moments that align with business goals like lead qualification and tour bookings.
Define
Why is Senior Living Search So Overwhelming?
Whether planned or urgent, the decision to move into senior living is often filled with stress, ambiguity, and emotional weight. Families must make one of life’s most important choices under pressure, often without a clear understanding of what they’re even looking for.
Choice Fatigue
Communities offer a wide range of services (independent living, assisted living, memory care), and it’s hard to know which one fits your unique situation.
Emotional Strain
These decisions often touch on autonomy, safety, , and even denial, making even small details feel loaded.
Logistical Complexity
Costs, timing, insurance, and location all add layers of complexity, especially when researching remotely or under tight timelines.
Why existing solutions weren’t enough
Self-serve content like articles, blogs, and FAQs is plentiful…but it puts the burden on users to sift through everything, interpret it, and apply it to their own unique situation.
Rule-based chatbots offer limited guidance but fall short when users ask unexpected questions. They can’t adapt or personalize, which often leads to frustration instead of clarity.
Smarter Support Through AI
Navigating senior living options isn’t just about accessing information, it’s about getting relevant guidance at the right time. Static content and scripted chatbots require users to do the work of filtering and interpreting. An AI-powered solution changes that by acting like a live concierge: offering tailored answers, anticipating next steps, and guiding users through their decision journey in a more responsive, human-like way.
Design Process
Understanding How The AI Chatbot Works
The chatbot uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to generate responses using vetted, community-specific information. With audience segmentation, we’re able to personalize that experience even further, adjusting content delivery based on who the user is.
To align the team and build trust with the client, I created a visual flow of the backend system, clarifying how requests are handled, content is approved, and operators stay in control—giving everyone confidence in both the tech and the design direction.
Rethinking the Right-Hand Corner Chatbot
Traditional chatbots are often a last resort…something users turn to when they’re already frustrated. To move away from that convention, I led a redesign that reimagined the experience entirely. Instead of a standard corner chatbot, we used a widget entry point that proactively surfaces relevant questions based on the page or user. This approach not only invites engagement earlier but also lets users choose how they want to interact.
Mirroring Decision-Making with the Sales Funnel
Interestingly, the user’s decision-making journey naturally aligns with the stages of the sales funnel. By supporting interactions around discovery, exploration, and action, the chatbot becomes more than just a support tool; it actively nurtures decision-making and guides users toward conversion.
Continuous Learning Loop
As the system adapts, mistakes are inevitable, so I built in a feedback loop to improve the experience over time and ensure users never hit a dead end:
Alternative Paths
When the AI can’t provide a clear answer, users are guided to other helpful resources or offered a handoff to human support.
Response Ratings
Users can rate AI responses, providing insight into what’s working and where the system needs refinement.
These touchpoints help the AI get smarter while making users feel heard and supported—even when the answer isn’t perfect.
Next Steps
As the product launches, we should stay closely aligned with the client to review chatbot behavior, identify moments of confusion or misalignment, and iterate strategies to strengthen trust and the relevance of information.
We’ll also define clear success metrics to guide iteration and measure impact over time:
User engagement – How long and how deeply users interact with the chatbot
Content relevance – Share rates as a signal of helpfulness and clarity
Conversion impact – From chatbot interaction to booked tour
Lead quality – Improved qualification through AI-assisted conversations
Final Thoughts
I’m proud to have untangled this project from its standstill, bringing clarity and alignment to move the team forward. By focusing on the core task, we created an experience that leveraged AI’s strengths to guide users with empathy through their decisions and the sales funnel.
Beyond the immediate outcomes, this project has sparked a deeper curiosity about designing for AI and how to build trust and safety between human and AI interactions. This project ultimately led me to take a design course for AI products at Stanford.