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Zedmail — AI Powered Messaging Assistant for Better Commuunication.
AI-powered webapp that cuts through the noise of your daily communication — emails, Slack, all of it — and just tells you what actually needs your attention today.
Role
Product Designer
Industry
Fintech · Mobile App
Project Timeline
3 Weeks
Image 1
Zedmail Cover
What was the Challenge?
The challenge of this project was to design an AI powered assistant capable of cutting through the noise of daily communication across the tools professionals rely on for work, namely Slack, Gmail, and Outlook.
Why did the Problem Matter?
The problem mattered because research showed that information overload comes at a global cost of one trillion dollars every year, with email and messaging sitting at the centre of that loss. Workers spend between five and fifteen point five hours a week simply reading, replying, sorting, and searching through messages.
Who did this Problem Affect?
This affects anyone whose work depends on constant communication, but it hits hardest for people without the structural support to offload that burden, namely founders and solo professionals managing everything themselves.
Real-World Context?
In real world terms, this is not just an inconvenience. It is lost productivity, missed opportunities, and a growing layer of anxiety that follows people outside of working hours.
What did Success for this Project Mean?
Success for this project meant designing a system that curbed the time spent rummaging through messages and helped people stay on top of what actually required their attention, without adding another tool to manage.
Image 2
Daily Brief Overview
Who did this Problem Affect?
This affects anyone whose work depends on constant communication, but it hits hardest for people without the structural support to offload that burden, namely founders and solo professionals managing everything themselves.
Real-World Context?
In real world terms, this is not just an inconvenience. It is lost productivity, missed opportunities, and a growing layer of anxiety that follows people outside of working hours.
What did Success for this Project Mean?
Success for this project meant designing a system that curbed the time spent rummaging through messages and helped people stay on top of what actually required their attention, without adding another tool to manage.
Image 3
Zedmail Inbox
How did the Research Phase Begin
The research phase began with identifying the target audience through contextual research into the problem itself, narrowing in on founders and solo professionals as the group most affected by this kind of overload. I looked at existing data on time lost to email and messaging, which confirmed the scale of the problem and gave the project a grounded starting point rather than an assumed one.
Competitive Analysis
I conducted an analysis of the competiton, looking closely at Superhuman and Notion Mail, two products operating in a similar conceptual space. I examined what each was doing well and where they were falling short for their current users. Superhuman optimised the speed of triage but did not eliminate the need to read most messages manually. Notion Mail offered a smarter interface but remained confined to a single channel.
Image 4
Mail Message
What did doing this Reveal?
Doing this revealed a clear gap: neither product worked across multiple communication channels simultaneously, and neither offered true intelligence about what mattered, only better organisation of what already existed.
Image 5
Slack Messages
What Understanding did this Research Lead to?
Bringing the research together led to a single defining insight: Professionals are not failing to manage their communication, they are being failed by tools that deliver everything and understand nothing. This reframed the problem away from a simple feature gap and toward something more fundamental.
Opportunity Framing
The opportunity that followed was to design an AI communication tool that functions as an intelligent filter rather than a passive container, one that reads across every channel a person uses and surfaces only what genuinely needs their attention. This insight shaped every principle that guided the design afterward, namely that the product needed to feel calm rather than overwhelming, intelligent rather than mechanical, and trustworthy enough that a user would rely on its judgement instead of falling back on manually checking everything themselves.
Image 6
Gmail Messages
Deciding how the Product Works
With the problem and opportunity clearly defined, I moved into structuring how the product would actually work. I drafted three use cases to ground the solution in real scenarios: a startup founder juggling investors, clients, and a small team across email and Slack, a freelance designer managing five clients simultaneously, and a consultant receiving upwards of a hundred emails a day, most of which had no real bearing on their immediate priorities.
Image 7
Outlook Messages
What did these Use Cases Inform?
These use cases informed the navigation structure, which I organised into three core sections, namely the daily brief, the tools available to act on messages, and the unified workspace bringing every connected source into one place. From there I mapped the information architecture in detail, defining how every screen and action related to each other, followed by the user flow tracing the full journey from onboarding through to acting on an item in the brief. This gave the product a clear structural logic before a single screen was designed.
Image 8
Sign-Up Screen
Design Process
The design phase began with the design system, built using variables in Figma to ensure visual coherence across every screen. I created a mood board sourced from references I had gathered to clarify the look and feel I wanted before committing to specific decisions. Sketching followed, allowing me to test layout ideas and interaction logic without the cost of refining pixels too early. Once the sketches felt resolved, I moved into high fidelity screens, building out the onboarding flow, the daily brief in its full state, the workspace views for Gmail, Outlook, and Slack, and the message detail view.
Image 9
Connect Sources
Image 10
Grant Permission
Outcome
The outcome of this project is a fully designed AI-powered communication assistant that sits above all existing tools (Email and Slack) and does the one thing none of them do: tells the user exactly what needs their attention today, and nothing else.
Problem Solved
What the design solved specifically is the daily cognitive overhead of triage. Instead of opening four apps, reading dozens of messages, and spending the first hour of the day just figuring out what to respond to, the user opens one screen: the daily brief, and the work is already done. Three categories, clear hierarchy, and an AI that has already read everything. The user just acts.
Image 11
Priority Messages
Overall Accomplishment
What this project achieved as a body of work is a complete, end-to-end product design that demonstrates strategic thinking, systems design, and visual craft working together. It is not a collection of pretty screens. It is a considered response to a real and costly problem, designed for a specific person, with a clear point of view from start to finish.
Back
Zedmail — AI Powered Messaging Assistant for Better Commuunication.
AI-powered webapp that cuts through the noise of your daily communication — emails, Slack, all of it — and just tells you what actually needs your attention today.
Role
Product Designer
Industry
Fintech · Mobile App
Project Timeline
3 Weeks
Image 1
Zedmail Cover
What was the Challenge?
The challenge of this project was to design an AI powered assistant capable of cutting through the noise of daily communication across the tools professionals rely on for work, namely Slack, Gmail, and Outlook.
Why did the Problem Matter?
The problem mattered because research showed that information overload comes at a global cost of one trillion dollars every year, with email and messaging sitting at the centre of that loss. Workers spend between five and fifteen point five hours a week simply reading, replying, sorting, and searching through messages.
Who did this Problem Affect?
This affects anyone whose work depends on constant communication, but it hits hardest for people without the structural support to offload that burden, namely founders and solo professionals managing everything themselves.
Real-World Context?
In real world terms, this is not just an inconvenience. It is lost productivity, missed opportunities, and a growing layer of anxiety that follows people outside of working hours.
What did Success for this Project Mean?
Success for this project meant designing a system that curbed the time spent rummaging through messages and helped people stay on top of what actually required their attention, without adding another tool to manage.
Image 2
Daily Brief Overview
Who did this Problem Affect?
This affects anyone whose work depends on constant communication, but it hits hardest for people without the structural support to offload that burden, namely founders and solo professionals managing everything themselves.
Real-World Context?
In real world terms, this is not just an inconvenience. It is lost productivity, missed opportunities, and a growing layer of anxiety that follows people outside of working hours.
What did Success for this Project Mean?
Success for this project meant designing a system that curbed the time spent rummaging through messages and helped people stay on top of what actually required their attention, without adding another tool to manage.
Image 3
Zedmail Inbox
How did the Research Phase Begin
The research phase began with identifying the target audience through contextual research into the problem itself, narrowing in on founders and solo professionals as the group most affected by this kind of overload. I looked at existing data on time lost to email and messaging, which confirmed the scale of the problem and gave the project a grounded starting point rather than an assumed one.
Competitive Analysis
I conducted an analysis of the competiton, looking closely at Superhuman and Notion Mail, two products operating in a similar conceptual space. I examined what each was doing well and where they were falling short for their current users. Superhuman optimised the speed of triage but did not eliminate the need to read most messages manually. Notion Mail offered a smarter interface but remained confined to a single channel.
Image 4
Mail Message
What did doing this Reveal?
Doing this revealed a clear gap: neither product worked across multiple communication channels simultaneously, and neither offered true intelligence about what mattered, only better organisation of what already existed.
Image 5
Slack Messages
What Understanding did this Research Lead to?
Bringing the research together led to a single defining insight: Professionals are not failing to manage their communication, they are being failed by tools that deliver everything and understand nothing. This reframed the problem away from a simple feature gap and toward something more fundamental.
Opportunity Framing
The opportunity that followed was to design an AI communication tool that functions as an intelligent filter rather than a passive container, one that reads across every channel a person uses and surfaces only what genuinely needs their attention. This insight shaped every principle that guided the design afterward, namely that the product needed to feel calm rather than overwhelming, intelligent rather than mechanical, and trustworthy enough that a user would rely on its judgement instead of falling back on manually checking everything themselves.
Image 6
Gmail Messages
Deciding how the Product Works
With the problem and opportunity clearly defined, I moved into structuring how the product would actually work. I drafted three use cases to ground the solution in real scenarios: a startup founder juggling investors, clients, and a small team across email and Slack, a freelance designer managing five clients simultaneously, and a consultant receiving upwards of a hundred emails a day, most of which had no real bearing on their immediate priorities.
Image 7
Outlook Messages
What did these Use Cases Inform?
These use cases informed the navigation structure, which I organised into three core sections, namely the daily brief, the tools available to act on messages, and the unified workspace bringing every connected source into one place. From there I mapped the information architecture in detail, defining how every screen and action related to each other, followed by the user flow tracing the full journey from onboarding through to acting on an item in the brief. This gave the product a clear structural logic before a single screen was designed.
Image 8
Sign-Up Screen
Design Process
The design phase began with the design system, built using variables in Figma to ensure visual coherence across every screen. I created a mood board sourced from references I had gathered to clarify the look and feel I wanted before committing to specific decisions. Sketching followed, allowing me to test layout ideas and interaction logic without the cost of refining pixels too early. Once the sketches felt resolved, I moved into high fidelity screens, building out the onboarding flow, the daily brief in its full state, the workspace views for Gmail, Outlook, and Slack, and the message detail view.
Image 9
Connect Sources
Image 10
Grant Permission
Outcome
The outcome of this project is a fully designed AI-powered communication assistant that sits above all existing tools (Email and Slack) and does the one thing none of them do: tells the user exactly what needs their attention today, and nothing else.
Problem Solved
What the design solved specifically is the daily cognitive overhead of triage. Instead of opening four apps, reading dozens of messages, and spending the first hour of the day just figuring out what to respond to, the user opens one screen: the daily brief, and the work is already done. Three categories, clear hierarchy, and an AI that has already read everything. The user just acts.
Image 11
Priority Messages
Overall Accomplishment
What this project achieved as a body of work is a complete, end-to-end product design that demonstrates strategic thinking, systems design, and visual craft working together. It is not a collection of pretty screens. It is a considered response to a real and costly problem, designed for a specific person, with a clear point of view from start to finish.