Company
Nayya
Duration
6 Months
Year
2025-2026
Context
Nayya is a SaaS platform that helps employees understand, choose, and use their employer-sponsored benefits through personalized guidance. Our mission was to expand Nayya beyond its existing products to support employees across their entire benefits journey, from hire to retire.
Choose
Personalized recommendations to help employees choose the right benefits for their needs.
Use
Helps employees understand and get more value from their benefits year-round.
Leave
Guides employees through leave with personalized timelines, pay, benefits, and next steps.
Retire
Helps employees plan for retirement by connecting their health, benefits, and finances.
Finance
Provides personalized guidance for savings, debt, taxes, and other financial goals.
Medicare
Guides employees through the transition from employer health coverage to Medicare.
archetypes
We identified three behavioral archetypes based on how employees approach health and financial decisions. Rather than belonging to a specific product or life stage, these behaviors appeared across the Nayya experience, from hire to retire.
Employee needs don’t fit neatly into individual products. Each archetype can appear across products, life stages, and use cases, from hire to retire.
problem
But Nayya’s experience was still organized around individual products. Bringing them under one navigation wouldn’t solve the core discovery problem: employees don’t think in terms of products. They think about what they’re trying to accomplish, whether that’s choosing a health plan, understanding a medical bill, or navigating their financial benefits.
Insight
70% avoid asking HR benefits questions for fear of looking uninformed.
Employees struggled to find accurate, personalized answers across complex plan information, unfamiliar terminology, and fragmented resources. They needed help understanding what applied to their specific situation.
HR teams were expected to fill that gap, but providing personalized benefits support at scale was difficult with limited time, resources, and visibility into individual employee needs.
opportunity
Shift from product-led to intent-led.
AI offered a way for employees to start with what they needed help with rather than knowing which Nayya product to use. By understanding intent and combining it with employees’ benefits context, AI could provide personalized guidance and connect them to the right product, information, or next step.
goal
Build one AI-native experience where conversation becomes the entry point to Nayya.
Build an AI Benefits Advisor
Create a conversational experience that understands employees’ needs, provides personalized guidance, and connects them to the right benefits and tools.
Transform the experience to be AI-native
Rethink how the AI Advisor and existing products work together to create a more seamless, personalized experience.
My Role
Partnered with a cross-functional team of designers, product managers, and engineers to design core AI platform features, establish scalable design foundations, and validate new interaction patterns through usability testing.
strategy
What roles can AI play and where are the opportunities for Nayya?
We started by exploring the broad range of roles AI could play and identified where its capabilities could create opportunities for Nayya. From there, we narrowed our focus to a more important product question: what role should AI actually play in the employee experience?
We mapped potential roles based on how much autonomy AI should have and how actively employees would engage with it, ranging from a teacher or assistant to a colleague, HR partner, or autonomous representative.
main chat
The home screen is designed to demonstrate the value of Nayya’s AI Advisor from the very first interaction. Suggested prompts introduce common, high-value use cases and help users overcome the uncertainty of knowing what to ask. Because Nayya has access to employer-provided benefits information, including plan details and each employee’s enrollment data, it can deliver personalized, plan-specific guidance rather than generic responses.
Users can access Nayya’s suite of benefits apps in two ways:
Browse from the Benefits Hub. The Benefits Hub provides a centralized entry point where users can discover and launch Nayya’s benefits apps. Apps open alongside the AI Advisor, allowing users to continue asking questions and receive guidance without interrupting the conversation.
Launch through AI recommendations. When the AI Advisor recognizes that a specific app can better support the user’s goal, it proactively recommends launching the relevant app. This helps users discover capabilities they may not have known existed while keeping the conversation active and preserving context throughout the experience.
The Recommendation Screen presents personalized recommendations, explains why a plan was recommended, and helps employees view and compare alternative options.
Side panel
Getting Recommendation
We didn’t simply bring the existing app experience into the new platform. We revisited user pain points, explored how the product and chat panels should work together, and tested different layouts and proportions with users. These insights helped us find the right balance, making information easier to digest while surfacing the right level of detail at the right time.
Survey
AI chat stayed accessible throughout the survey, letting employees ask questions and get additional context whenever needed.
Advisor Insights
User testing validated that AI-generated Advisor Insights helped employees understand why a plan was recommended, not just what to choose.
Participants responded positively to personalized explanations that translated complex benefits terminology into plain language, making recommendations feel more relevant, understandable, and trustworthy.
Plan Options
Kept plan explanations brief to encourage users to engage with the AI for more details or specific questions, while making the compare grid easier to find and access.
Design system
As Nayya’s product suite grew, teams needed a more consistent and scalable way to design and build experiences. We created the design system as a shared foundation across design and engineering, helping teams move faster while improving consistency, quality, and accessibility.
