Contracted AI · One week as founding designer

Sole founding designer, one week, three deliverables.

Contracted, Inc. sells egocentric robot training data to robotics labs. It recruits the people who record it through two separate funnels: one where a business signs up its crew, one where an at-home creator signs up alone. I was the sole founding designer for one week, and the week touched both.

Three things shipped: an audit of the live business funnel with every finding reproduced, a written design system across 46 boards, and a 27-screen rebuild of the at-home funnel, delivered as a clickable prototype the founders can walk without me.

The first screen was named after an admin field.

The business funnel’s entry screen led with the internal project name, “External Recording Business”. No logo, no company name, no rate. Its two choice cards carried identical weight, so the path that earns the money was not distinguished from the one that does not.

I measured the business funnel before I redesigned anything.

Eleven defects, each reproduced against the live site in an isolated headless Chromium before it was written down. The sharpest one lands at the worst possible moment: the applicant reads their own answers back as the literal string false | false, on the screen where they agree to let a company record their workplace. The fix is a label lookup the instrument already ships.

Evidence goes into the review in the product’s own black and its own typeface, never paraphrased into mine. A founder can check a quote in sixty seconds. A paraphrase he has to take on trust.

Evidence set in the product’s own black. Anything in that black is a verbatim quote. Outlined means reconstructed.

The boards were setting body copy at 11.5px on a phone. So I wrote the floor down.

The product boards were running body copy at 11.5px on a 390 phone, in a grey the written system had already retired. I raised the ramp and put a floor under it: desktop body 14px, mobile body 14.5px, mono labels 11px, tap targets 44px. Measured across every text node on every board, the nodes under 11px went from 177 to 16, and the 16 that remain all sit inside one app-store badge lockup.

Back on the served funnel: fourteen em dashes in the English copy, zero in the Spanish, where the translator had reached for colons instead. On a funnel asking small businesses to trust an AI company inside their workplace, the English original carried the most recognisable machine-writing tell and the translation did not.

One decision per screen.

The rule is the client’s, not mine. “It’s always one thing at a time,” one founder said. The other asked for “simple, simple, simple, simple.” The business funnel I had just audited stacked four asks on one screen, so that screen is where the rule is easiest to see. The demo below applies it there.

The client’s rule, applied to the screen the audit found. Each seam is a decision about where the question ends. These four are the business funnel’s eligibility group, not a screen from the rebuild.

The rebuild itself was the other funnel. Contracted’s ad already routes at-home creators to their own URL, and that path is the one they asked me to redraw: 27 screens from the ad click to the first payment, under the same rule, including the two multi-day waits that nobody had designed.

One build script emits both the design board and the clickable prototype from a single screen list, so the drawing and the thing you can click cannot drift apart.