Designing an AI-first family assistant
Ohai
2026
Who is OHAI
Ohai is an AI household assistant for busy families. Parents text, talk to, or forward emails to the assistant, and it turns school newsletters, schedules and PDFs into a shared family calendar, tasks, meal plans and grocery lists. It was founded by Sheila Marcelo, founder of Care.com.
Tools
Year
2026
My Role
Freelancer Lead Product Designer
Industry
AI / Family Tech - Productivity
Team
Tamara Laforest, Lead Product Designer
Shivani Hajela, Product Owner
Supriya Madavil, Project Manager
Manish Sinha, Head of Engineering
Alexa Gornago, Motion design / Illustrations
The full redesign of Ohai: a warmer brand, a coherent system and an AI-first experience.
THE PROBLEM
Missing coherence between features
Ohai had grown fast, and it showed. Screens built at different times used different patterns, styles and tones, so the app felt like several products stitched together. The brand didn't help either: its dark, technical look felt closer to developer software than to something made for families. For an assistant meant to take stress off parents, the experience needed to feel warm, calm and trustworthy.
THE GOAL
Rebranded, rebuilt, AI first
Rebrand Ohai and rebuild the experience around one idea: less is more. That meant a new brand, mascot and colour palette, a coherent design system to carry them across every screen, and putting the AI front and centre. Along the way, we designed new features: to-dos, email scanning, smarter reminders and a new household system.
THE PROCESS
Four steps, from audit to launch
01 Audit
02 Rebrand
03 Redesign
04 Design System & Rollout
01
Auditing the existing flows
I started by walking through every existing flow to understand what was there, what worked and what didn't. Knowing the platform's history and limitations meant I could keep what was already working in the redesign.
02
Evolving the brand
The previous designer had instituted a placeholder mascot (the octopus) and had begun work on a brand moodboard. Utilizing these assets as a foundation, I built a complete brand identity and evolved the temporary mascot into a fully realized one with the help of an illustrator: Olly was born.
Delivering the animations as Lottie files meant developers could drop them straight into the app with no extra build work, making the experience more interactive and fun.
03
Redesigning the app
With the brand and system in place, I redesigned the full experience around "less is more," putting the AI front and centre so families could simply ask for what they need. I also designed brand new features in the process: to-dos, email scanning, smarter reminders and a new household system.
04
Design system and rollout
Ohai had previously been operating without a design system. I built one from scratch while designing the features, making sure to deliver reusable components that keep every screen consistent, no matter what. I reviewed every build with the developers through launch and post-launch and documented every Figma file, allowing Product Managers to turn designs directly into actionable tickets.
One character, a pose for every moment
Each pose maps to a moment in the app, from onboarding and empty states to celebrations and errors. Illustrated by Alexa Gornago; I defined the character direction and art-directed the poses for product moments.
What they have to say
Sheila Marcelo
Founder @ Ohai - Founder @ Care.com
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