Designing Sophiie Past Its MVP
What I learned redesigning an AI receptionist as it grew from one feature into a full product.
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- Project notes, Design Systems
Sophiie began with a single core feature: an AI receptionist that answers calls for service businesses. Then came messages and emails, scheduling, customers and invoices, and the interface built for that first feature started to strain under everything that followed.
Structure before screens
The temptation with a growing product is to redesign it screen by screen. I started with structure instead: what people come to Sophiie to do, where each of those things lives, and what should always be one step away. Once that held, every screen had somewhere to go.
The data-heavy parts got the most care. Invoices and customer records are tables people scan all day, so each one leads with the few columns that matter and lets the rest step back.
One system, three surfaces
Sophiie lives on a marketing website, a desktop dashboard and mobile views. I built one flexible design system for all three, so a button, a table or a status behaves the same everywhere, and new features start from parts that already exist.
What I learned
A product that grows out of an MVP doesn't need a prettier version of its first layout. It needs a layout with room for the next five features.
Keep the design system small at first. A handful of components used everywhere beats a large library nobody trusts, and it can grow with the product.