Streamline Climate
Founding Designer
2023
-
2025
Streamline Climate is a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2023 that offers AI-powered software to streamline government funding processes for climate technology companies.
The platform automates tasks like sourcing, qualifying, drafting, and managing grant proposals and RFP responses leveraging generative AI.
Tools used
Concepts App
Figjam
Figma
Cursor AI
Vercel v0
React
HTML/CSS
Luma fusion
Spline
skills
Collaborative problem solving
Design thinking
User empathy
Intellectual curiosity
Project management
Front-End development
Code Review
PRD writing
Communication
User research
Competitive analysis
0-to-1 product development
Highlight
Platform grew from just a few screens to a whole platform allowing our users to seamlessly discover, qualify, manage, and draft grant proposals
Contributions to our codebase
Docs uploaded by customers
Hours saved by customers
Prompts answered
My User Experience (UX) Design Process
Understand current app design and user flow
Brainstorming to uncover the right solution
Replicate the mock-up into the final product
Talk to Design partner and look at the competition
High fidelity prototype to validate idea and generate user feedback
UX Audit
Managing delieverables
Card were hard to understand with vague metrics like time saved and time remaining.
New application modal is very confusing and hard to navigate and find what user is looking for.
New application modal is very confusing and hard to navigate and find what user is looking for.
Creating new files
Too many clicks to get into the editor which felt frustrating to many of our users
Once user has gone through all that they have to wait for an unknown duration before they can finally enter an editor.
Editing files
Editor doesn't feel like an editor.
Cluncky interaction which are also very confusing to the user.
Too many steps to generate an answer
Making the application navigation more intuitive
One of my very first task after joining the team was to rethink our platform structure and improve navigation.
We moved away from a horizontal navigation to a more common UX pattern using a side bar. This move immediately made navigating the platform more intuitive, and allowed us to dedicate full screens to important features.
Discover — Search
Our search was designed from the ground up for the AI era.
It combines natural language with powerful filters to allow users to refine their search query based on key values such as as Status, Funding Amount, Funder, Types, and Eligible Entities.
We didn't want our search to feel like a black box, so we gave users the ability to see why a result was surfaced.
In order to bring clarity to our search result, we added a "Why this result" button through which our AI explain to users why a given result was surfaced and why it's relevant to the search query.
Discover was designed with all screen sized in mind so that our core features are accessible across different breakpoints
The challenge was to make save searches and Bookmark list accessible even on small screens. Borrowing from Notion minimalist outline, I designed and built a dynamic component that would collapsed when the view width is small allowing user to get access to our features on more screens.
Pain points we were trying to address with Search
No great solutions for AI powered search and semantic search
Customers have to go to many different sites and subscribe to several mailing lists just to stay on top of opportunity and track key details.
Discover — Grant details
When a user is ready to dive into an opportunity, Streamline offers a rich grant details page.
The user can easily access key details extracted directly from a solicitation presented in a digestible using our table component as well as our timeline component. When that is not enough, the user has access to an assistant that allow them to dive deeper into an opportunity. All answers are backed by real sources which the user can access at any given time.
Readiness Check
Re-Run
Team
High
Project
Md
Financing
Low
Key Details
Fitness
Eligible Domestic Entities: private companies, universities, national laboratories, and non-profits.
Strong fit
Target Industries
More info needed
Cost Share
Weak fit
Add Requirement
Chat with opportunity
Streamline AI
Now
Welcome to Ask anything. Feel free to ask me anything about this Request For Information (RFI). How can I help?
Here are some suggestions to get started
What is the purpose of this RFI?
Who should provide input for this RFI?
What industries does this RFI interest?
Ask
Request for information (RFI)
Ask anything about solicitation
Applying
All application in progress now live on the applications' page
From the application page, user can jump into any application they are applying to. Clicking on a card on this page will take the user to the grant management page where they will be able to access the many deliverables (submissions) related to the opportunity.
For a successful application, quality knowledge is important.
From the grant management page, users can easily curate documents they want to be used to generate answers. Setting up sources at this level makes drafting using AI in the editor much easier as the AI already access to all the relevant context pertaining to the opportunity.
Submissions packages and deadlines should be easy to track.
Using generative AI, Streamline is able to group submissions packages in a chronological order which makes tracking packages very intuitive and easy to manage.
From this tab, the user can jump in any deliverables to start drafting or upload a finished draft to leverage our AI feedback.
Pain points we were trying to address with App management
Managing an opportunity feels very segmented today, our customers have to jumps between tools like Asana, Notion, Google sheet to manage their opportunities which is not optimal.
Ai generated answers feel like a black box because users don't have access to all the knowledge from solicitation available to the AI.
Drafting
We have designed and build a powerful, yet flexible editor that let the user work how they want.
Whether a user want to start a draft from scratch or get a helping hand from our AI, our editor was designed with flexibility and versatility in mind. They can use the hover menu for quick inline edit or jump into the chat for longer brainstorming sessions.
We wanted to build a versatile hover menu that is both intuitive to use but also one that allow users to quickly know what data is going to be used for generation.
Without opening the documents popover, users can horizontally scroll to view and manage documents that the AI will be using for the generation.
With hundred of documents uploaded on Streamline, we had to rethink how users navigate the chaos.
When working on designs for documents management, I mostly looked at IDEs like Cursor and Windsurf to inspire myself as they were the only tools too my knowledge that were dealing to an extent with the same problem we were facing — finding and locating the right document to reference
Pain points we were trying to address with Editor
It's hard to find documents we want to use in generation.
Users were not able to search tags even though they could tag documents which felt self defeating.
It's hard to know at a glance what documents are selected versus not.
Custom website
Since joining Streamline, I have designed and built 2 landing pages and a complex CMS to manage blog posts.
When I first joined Streamline, we didn't have a website as our product was still very young without many offerings. A few months following that after deploying beta discover and new editor, we felt we were now ready to unveil our product to the world and attract new customers.
Tools used
Concepts App
Figjam
Figma
Framer
The goal of our first website was to showcase our suite of features and attract more traffic to our website.
While our goal was successfull, and we saw a spike in traffic, we didn't get the type of conversion (booked calls) as we wanted. We slowly started shifting CTAs to leading more of our users to Discover which we believe would tremendously help our efforts.
Pain points we were trying to address with Website v0
Introduce users to what Streamline is
Present our platform and features we offer to help companies looking to win government funding
Increase traffic to platform
Increase number of booked calls
The website redesign has been a massive success which has helped us to increase traffic to Discover and increase booked demos.
In order to achieve our goal, our landing page was redesigned from the ground up to be centered curated lists. We believed that by showing people opportunities that are interesting to them, we can get them inside the platform and get them to book a demo.
Pain points we were trying to address with Website v1
Increase number of booked demos
Show potential customers opportunities they might be interested in through
Increase traffic to platform
Increase number of booked calls
Microsoft Word Add-In
In order to cater to all of our users and ensure a non disruptive flow, we realized having a Ms Word Add-in is must.
Designing for Ms Word Add-in I had to work within very limited width constraints and essentially build a mobile experience for streamline and not just a chat bot to ensure our user could still leverage a lot of the benefit provided by our web app.
Pain points we were trying to address with Ms Word Add-in
A lot of our users still heavily rely on Microsoft word and google docs to do their work
Our Editor is still lacking some key features around formatting which is essential for submission so ensuring continue with a third party is crucial in setting up our users for success
Preparing for Handoff
We didn't have a formal handoff process at streamline as things moved super fast. That being said, I would usually record a loom and share a figma link to the design that need to be implemented.
For some features I would directly implement them myself, as it was the fastest way to get them to production.
Note
I would usually go back to most screen after they are deployed to ensure that they are responsive and closer to the Figma designs.
Key takeaways
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