React-Vite-Tailwind chat onboarding prototype
Testing assumptions with a live chat prototype: the facilitator playing the AI in real time.
The prototype sleeps when idle — give it ~30s to wake up.
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Faking the agent to learn faster
To test a tax onboarding conversation, I built a live chat prototype in Builder.io (chosen because it pulls in our design components from Figma with a copy-paste).
Instead of spending a sprint configuring a real agent to run the onboarding conversation, I ran it as a Wizard of Oz: a facilitator typing the AI’s responses in real time. Participants believed they were talking to a live AI.
It helped us improve the conversation flow and interaction patterns and get authentic reactions to an experience that didn’t exist.
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A pattern other teams picked up
Other prototypes included links to Google Sheets, so we could show live-feeling tax calculations with no back end at all.
After sharing the approach in a brown-bag session and on Slack, other teams started leveraging it too.
