Fire & Safety AI Assistant
Designing a user experience and brand for an innovative, RAG enabled AI. Grounded in research, built around the way real professionals work.
Client
National Fire Protection Association
Services
User Research
Interface Design
Branding
Marketing
Client
National Fire Protection Association
The challenge
To meet the needs of field professionals, NFPA partnered with our Human-Centered Design (HCD) team to create a next-generation AI assistant for code and standards product, NFPA LiNK. Our team built a custom experience to deliver authoritative, instant code guidance - designed for speed, accuracy, and trust.
Research
I led research starting with 19 live in-depth interviews to test reactions to staged queries and responses. Our user base was diverse - from firefighters to building inspectors. What should talking to our agent feel like? What kinds of questions were people most likely to ask?
Our goal was to explore how users respond to variations in tone, functionality, and assistant personality. This helped us understand what a trusted, helpful AI tool should sound like in the context of codes and standards.
Interface Design
Our team wanted this experience to encompass more than just text. As the leading voice in fire and electrical safety, our client's agent had acess to a vast library, with the ability to surface a variety of media in rich responses.
Because we needed to enforce trust above all, interactive citations were thoughtfully designed to balance quick responses in natural language with proof of source, endearing confidence in every response.
Brand
The goal of investing in AI for NFPA's flagship product would be to revolutionize their platform from an occasional-use tool to a daily career companion. Brand was key. This had to be more than a feature release. It needed a presence and personality all it's own.
In conjunction with launch, we developed an ownable brand and mascot in Casi (Code and Safety Intelligence). I developed a logo mark that balanced our client's goal for a fun, approachable mascot with the trust and multifaceted intelligence users identified in research as most important for adoption.
Outcomes