My Framer Site

Backed by Y Combinator and $3M in funding, Toronto-based Tempolabs is building a leading AI-powered app development tool for resource-limited startup founders.

Responsibilities

Led user research, designed AI-agent experience from scratch, and built a design system for smooth designer-engineer collaboration.

Overview

I was part of the team that designed Tempolabs' AI-powered app-generation tool, Tempo AI. Joining during prototype testing, my role was to reassess functionality, conduct usability testing, and optimize the user experience for a successful launch by the end of the sprint. Tempo AI was successfully launched in August 2024.

Impact - after first 3 months

+30%

Onboarding completion

More users successfully complete the early phases in the user flow.

+20%

Day 1 & Day 7 retention

Users are more likely to return once they've experienced early value.

+20%

Day 1 & Day 7 retention

Users are more likely to return once they've experienced early value.

Read the full case study

What is Tempo AI?

Tempolabs helps startup teams build products faster with a collaborative, visual platform. Its new AI agent, Tempo AI, turns simple prompts into fully generated, production-ready apps.

Challenge

Small or solo founders struggle to build and launch products quickly due to limited resources. Tempolabs aimed to solve this by creating an app-generation tool that unifies design and development—enabling rapid prototyping and deployment. This vision defined my role on the team.

However, the current Tempo AI beta product fails to meet user expectations and has resulted in:

Deep Dive into the problem through Research

Client research revealed that solo founders using AI tools often receive prototypes that don’t align with their original ideas, leading to low satisfaction. To address this, I developed a targeted research plan to uncover pain points in competing tools and assess Tempo AI’s limitations in bridging this idea-to-output gap.

Competitive Audit

To identify opportunities in the AI app-generation space, I had 5 participants use competing tools—FlutterFlow, Devin AI, Copilot, and Galileo—to build an app of their choice.

Through my research, I've found both strengths and weaknesses of our competitors. I've organized the comments from participants about their experiences of using these tools into a timeline for a typical workflow of a tech founder.

User Interviews

To uncover usability pain points in Tempo AI, I had the same 5 participants use it to build the same app they created with competing tools.

Opportunities:

Through synthesizing pain points by product development phases, I identified a gap between idea and production. The following 3 key pain points highlight this gap. By addressing this, our product can stand out in the competitive market and help users build successful products.

How might we help founders gain more control and better manage AI's decision-making to build products that are the results of incremental, iterative changes?

Goal

Based on the discovered pain points, I've developed a hypotheses - the new feature must achieve these 3 goals to be considered successful:

Solutions: Clarifying AI Interpretation

To address these user pain points, I’ve developed targeted solutions that bridge the gap within the workflow, leading to more accurate and satisfactory final products generated by the AI.