The agent lives in your inbox

Cedar · 2024–25 · Staff Product Designer · 6 weeks · Shipped · Measured

People job hunting while working full time don't have room for another app. With the CEO and CTO, I put the AI agent in their inbox, gave it a voice with strict rules, and kept a small web app for what email can't do. 81% daily open rate, 5% paid conversion.

Short

Inbox · No app to remember.

Busy people job hunting while working full time already open their email every day. So the agent lives there, in Gmail and other clients, with no complex app or login to build. A small web app handles what email can't: browsing recommendations, preferences, the profile.

Voice · A personality, not a template.

For the agent to feel like a real person, it needed rules, and it only emails when there's clear value. A few of them:

One clear CTA, like "Explore Today's Job Matches".
About three sentences, friendly and personal: "Hey, just wanted to give you a heads up—I found a few roles that might be right up your alley."
Credible when it matters: "I looked through 238,875 relevant jobs in my database."
When there are no jobs, it reassures without a CTA.

Feedback · Real feedback steered the MVP.

We clustered and counted what people told us. Daily emails felt too frequent (3×). Matches ignored hard filters like country and must-have skills (4×). Swiping felt "perhaps too fast to make a good judgement" (2×). The rapid wireframe and flow iterations helped the CEO and CTO firm up the vision quickly.

Craft · The application package.

Company background attached, all possible application answers drafted by the agent, and average time to submit: 4 mins. The agent's voice and the product's value on one phone screen.

Foundation · Also mine.

The logo, mascot, palette and type; a component library built with Tailwind; mobile-first emails and a responsive web app. 70+ wireframes and mockups, 30+ flows in 80 hours.

Result

5% Paid conversion (Measured)
81% Daily email open rate (Measured)
35% Recommendations accepted (Measured)

Credits

Product, brand, UI, agent voice, design system. With the CEO, CTO, and the engineers.

Limits

The initial design decisions are no longer part of Cedar’s significantly evolved experience, but they helped answer key questions early on.

One honest line

Working with conversational AI at the time meant constantly refining and adjusting the instructions.

Next case: From 20% task success to 80%