Overview

As a Product Design Engineer Intern at Palona AI, a startup building AI-powered hospitality agents for restaurants, I worked at the intersection of engineering, design, and strategy. I reworked Palona’s brand presence through a full corporate website redesign, tightening messaging and design to increase conversion rates for client call scheduling.

On the product side, I conducted user interviews with restaurant owners and managers to inform the design of an analytics dashboard, translating insights into interactive Figma prototypes and production-ready React/TypeScript components. My work helped sharpen Palona’s positioning while shaping tools that empower restaurants to engage with AI agents more intuitively.

Research & Context

Palona AI builds conversational agents for the hospitality industry, helping restaurants automate reservations, waitlists, and customer communication. To ground our website redesign in user needs, I led qualitative research with restaurant owners and managers across the Bay Area. Our goal was to understand how small businesses perceive AI adoption, where friction occurs in onboarding, and what information helps build trust in enterprise-facing technology.

Key insights revealed that decision-makers wanted credibility, speed, and clear ROI. Many avoided demos due to “generic startup” impressions or unclear pricing models. This shaped our new focus: make the website feel trustworthy, outcome-driven, and human.

Problem & Goals

Working with the founding team, I owned the visual and UX redesign — reworking information architecture, refining copy, and rebuilding components in React + TypeScript with a modular system for scalability.

Website Redesign

I designed and developed core pages including the Landing, Features, AI Agent, Channels, and Use Cases pages — creating templates that the team could reuse for future verticals. Each section emphasized storytelling around customer impact and simplicity in navigation.

Call Analytics Dashboard

Alongside the public site redesign, I led design and front-end prototyping for an internal analytics dashboard to visualize AI agent performance — including call transcripts, sentiment summaries, and conversion insights. The project involved user interviews with restaurant operators.

Takeaways

Redesigning Palona’s website taught me how design decisions can directly impact business growth — from driving measurable conversion increases to reinforcing brand credibility. Working in a fast-paced startup environment pushed me to balance creativity with efficiency and to communicate design intent clearly across engineering and marketing teams.

• Design for trust: Simplifying structure, language, and hierarchy built stronger credibility for enterprise clients.
• Prototype collaboratively: Iterating directly in React and Figma helped bridge design and development faster.
• Measure the impact: Design is successful when it’s measurable — in this case, a 200% increase in demo requests post-launch.

This experience reaffirmed my passion for designing interfaces that make advanced technologies — like AI agents — feel approachable, human, and genuinely helpful to users.