Mike MacDonald
All work

Founding designer · 2025 – 2026

Contio

Agent surfaces for Contio, the AI meeting platform that turns what gets said into what gets done.

Role
Principal Product Designer (founding designer)
Timeline
Mar 2025 – Nov 2026
Platforms
Web, desktop, iOS, Android
Contio desktop app: week view with the agent chat open
Contio on iPhone capturing a meeting with a live waveform
70+
production PRs shipped
+20%
engineering output
4 apps
web, desktop, iOS, Android
10,000+
AI-captured meetings

Overview

Founding and sole product designer from zero to launch. Multi-turn agent chat, human-in-the-loop review, Canvases that turn a conversation into a first draft, Next Steps that send it where the work lives, and bot-free meeting capture, designed in code and shipped across web, desktop, iOS and Android.

My role

  • Product design, UX and user flows from zero to launch
  • Branding and feature prioritization
  • Agent behavior and HITL flows, with the founding AI engineer
  • Design engineering across web, desktop, iOS and Android

Results

  • Thousands of users; tens of thousands of captured meetings
  • Figma handoffs replaced by designing in code; team output up 20%
  • Storybook replaced the Figma library as the source of truth
  • iOS and Android apps shipped to both stores, co-built view by view
The principle

AI woven into the UI, not pasted in

Every agent capability showed up where the work happened: action items under the meeting that produced them, with approve, reject and send-to-chat right on the row. Raw chat output was the fallback, never the interface.

Contio desktop app: a week of meetings with action items listed under the meeting that produced them
Week view with inline action items and the Ask Contio bar
Agents

Multi-turn agents with a human in the loop

Agents drafted; people decided. The chat showed which tools it used, cited its sources (here, a Linear ticket) and offered the next move as a chip. Anything consequential waited for a person to approve it.

Contio desktop app: agent chat panel citing a Linear ticket and offering suggested next actions
Agent chat with tool use, citations and suggested actions
Contio desktop app: a workflow that has finished its Summarize step and is waiting at Review, a human approval gate, with one branch to run if approved and another if rejected
A human approval gate in a workflow: the run stops at Review, and the reviewer’s answer picks the branch (a QA project)
Capture

Capture the meeting, keep the knowledge

Meeting capture with a live waveform, automated notes and action items that landed in the right place. Designed and co-built for iOS and Android, then shipped to both stores.

Contio on iPhone: today’s meetings with one in progress
Today’s meetings
Contio on iPhone: a meeting ready to capture
Ready to capture
Contio on iPhone: capturing a meeting with a live waveform
Capturing
Documents

Documents that write themselves, with supervision

Agentic document and collateral generation from meeting history, with provenance visible so people trusted what they sent.

Contio desktop app: an agent-drafted client review agenda with a recap from the last meeting, prior action items and context from history, beside the agent explaining which template and past reviews it used
A client-review agenda drafted from meeting history, showing the recap and context it drew on
The method

From Figma handoffs to designing in code

I led the shift to designing in code: 70+ PRs across web, desktop, iOS and Android, and a Storybook library as the design-system source of truth. Engineering output rose about 20%. Settings, below, was one of the views I shipped end to end.

Contio design-system spec, section 1, Color: five palette families (brand purple, cool grays, blue and navy, error coral, success and warning), each a row of swatches with step numbers and hex values, and a note that hardcoded colours are blocked in CI
Design-system spec, colour: every palette family is a scale of tokens in code
Contio design-system spec, section 4, Buttons: ten colours each shown as solid, outline and ghost, five sizes from xs to xl, and pill, disabled and loading states
Buttons: one component drives every button in the product, by colour, variant, size and shape
Contio desktop app: the account settings page
Account settings, shipped as a PR
The story

Brand, website and the story

Founding designer meant the website, the pitch and the explainers as well. The current site at contio.ai carries the product language I helped shape: before, during and after the meeting; Canvases that turn conversation into a first draft; Next Steps that send it where the work lives; no bot, no recording. The security explainer made the private-cloud story legible in a glance.

The hero on contio.ai/benefits: Benny, the benefits agent, working a renewal from first flag to enrollment
contio.ai: “AI that turns what gets said into what gets done”, beside product screens
contio.ai today
Isometric illustration of Contio’s private cloud walled off from other AI notetakers
MeetingOS security explainer
WEBcontio.ai
Failure states

Design the failure states first.

Designing for a probabilistic system taught me to start with what happens when the model is wrong. Confidence, provenance and an easy undo did more for trust than any amount of polish on the happy path.