Elevate — AI-Powered Marketing Automation for Small Business

Elevate is an AI-powered marketing automation platform for small businesses — automated email, social scheduling, and customer-engagement workflows behind a four-step onboarding that configures everything. Designed end to end and developed with Claude, shipped as a live working prototype.

Role: Product Design & Prototyping

The Challenge

Marketing automation is where small business owners give up. The tools assume marketing literacy they don't have, front-load configuration before showing any value, and treat setup as an afterthought. The design question behind Elevate: can onboarding itself do the configuring — asking a handful of plain-language questions and letting AI translate the answers into a working setup?

The Approach

The flow was structured as three movements — questionnaire, guidance, configuration — compressed into a 3–5 step wizard with clear progress indicators. Each answer narrows what the product shows next: progressive disclosure keeps first-run complexity low, and the AI-guided configuration step turns the questionnaire's plain-language answers into concrete campaign settings the user can review rather than build.

  • Questionnaire-driven personalization — the product configures itself from plain-language answers
  • Multi-step wizard with visible progress, sized to 3–5 steps
  • Progressive disclosure of features so the first run never shows the whole machine
  • Responsive layout across desktop and mobile breakpoints

Design Exploration

The same onboarding flow was built in three distinct visual directions — neumorphism (soft shadows, tactile feel), glassmorphism (frosted translucency), and a bold gradient system — as live HTML comps, using the working prototype itself to compare how visual weight changes the perceived effort of the same steps.

What Shipped

A live landing page and complete onboarding prototype, built in HTML and Tailwind CSS and deployed on its own subdomain. Working prototypes over static mockups: every pattern in the flow can be clicked through, tested, and revised in production conditions.