Umi
Umi is Panasonic WELL's wellness coach that helps families build healthy habits through goal setting, routines, and connection.
Launched at CES 2025, Umi combines proactive coaching with conversational group chat. I led experience design for Umi — its voice, interface, and multi-user model. Umi makes healthy living a shared, sustainable practice.
A different assistant
Umi was the first multi-player assistant designed for families. We wanted it to feel different from anything else on the market. We had an expressive logo that tested great with families, so we built the foundation of its design system on the "pixels" of the logo itself. These elemental forms became the expressive vocabulary of the entire interface and VUI experience.
Families didn't want to open the app to a blank screen — they wanted to know what to do next.
So Umi greets them every time, surfacing next steps and catching them up on the family chat around whatever goal they're working toward.
Umi had two surfaces: an agentic family chat and a wellness dashboard.
The dashboard was the harder design problem — how do you show a family's health as a shared picture without turning it into a scoreboard? We landed on a visualization that tracks collective progress instead of ranking individuals.
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Umi shipped to the App Store in early 2025. Panasonic sunset the product shortly after, as priorities shifted. What I carry forward is what we built — a working demonstration of multi-player agentic design, shipped in under a year, that tested well with the families we designed it for. The team also earned a patent for Systems and Methods for Dynamic Conversational Interfaces According to Detected User Behaviors (not shown above) — roughly two years ahead of the current market.