DESIGN RESEARCH | INTERACTION DESIGN
Texas Tribune AI Assistant
Meeting Texans where they are.
Chief Creative Officer: Jacob Villanueva
Chief Product Officer: Darla Cameron
March 2025
Redesigning the Tribune’s AI chatbot to improve engagement and usability by transforming it from a hidden pop-out to a fully integrated, story-embedded experience. Led UX direction, UI design, and tone exploration while aligning with the organization’s design system.
The Texas Tribune launched an AI chatbot to help readers explore nuanced topics like school vouchers. Despite its potential, the tool saw low engagement; it was hidden in a pop-out interface, hard to find, and offered little guidance on how to use it.
The team asked for a redesign that would make the chatbot more discoverable and accessible within the article itself, placing more consideration on its placement and interaction model to encourage more meaningful use.
Research + Wireframing
With a short timeline and limited user data, I turned to fast, tactical research and prototyping.
I started by capturing screenshots of the current experience and conducting a quick competitive analysis of how other organizations were designing chatbots, especially in journalism and customer service. What stood out was how many chatbots helped orient users from the start, while ours fell short of this. One of the biggest issues, I realized, was that people didn’t even know where to begin. It’s hard to ask a question when you don’t know what you don’t know.
From there, I began wireframing a new experience that embedded the chatbot directly inside the article instead of tucking it away. I mapped out a flow that would gently onboard users and designed starter prompts to help people start exploring.
How might we redesign the chatbot to feel intuitive, helpful, and easy to engage with, especially for users who aren’t sure what to ask?
While I don’t have access to post-launch metrics, this project set a precedent for product design in the newsroom. It redefined how Tribune surfaces experimental tools, extended the organization’s design system with a new component that could scale for future bot deployments, and modeled a fast, thoughtful design process, balancing visual polish, strategic storytelling, and light research under a tight deadline.