Laika
Product design for Laika — an enterprise collaboration platform built with Vaadin: research-driven UX, real-time collaboration, AI-assisted insights, and a customized design system.
- Client
- Laika
- Role
- Senior Product Designer
- Year
- 2023
- Live
- Visit ↗
Overview
Laika is an enterprise collaboration platform built with Vaadin (2023) that helps smaller teams inside larger organizations work together — real-time collaboration, streamlined task management, and AI-powered insights in one place.
Problem
Smaller enterprise teams faced three issues: no synchronized updates (causing misalignment), fragmented task management across multiple tools, and poor visibility into priorities and bottlenecks.
Research & discovery
I ran a competitive analysis of Asana, Jira, Confluence, and Trello, then interviewed developers, designers, and project managers in startup and small-team settings. Users were caught between excessive complexity and inadequate collaboration — a clear gap in customization and real-time features.
Framework & design
Personas and journey maps guided wireframing. The architecture centered on three pillars: task management, live updates via the Vaadin Collaboration Kit, and chatbot-driven analytics. Low-fidelity wireframes evolved into high-fidelity prototypes with chatbot integration and predictive capabilities, refined through iterative testing with developers, designers, and stakeholders.
Design system
I customized the Vaadin Design System and fed back improvements that contributed to a system-wide modernization, improving component consistency and enterprise usability.
