Luminora

Wendy is your sidekick for real life. She takes care of the busy parts of life so you can get off your screen and enjoy your real one: out in the world, with your friends, doing what you love. Success isn't time spent with Wendy; it's time well spent away from her.

Every turn makes the next one better: the more she knows, the more she can take off your plate, and the more of your real life you get back.

Day one, she handles one small, real thing perfectly. By week one, she's planning your days with you. By month one, she knows your patterns and protects your time without being asked.

Chatting with AI today is one-sided: you can't see anyone, and it agrees with almost everything you say. These are the principles I design Wendy around.

I don't only design the screens around Wendy; I write the rules for how she thinks, talks and learns, and ship them into her instructions.

You aren't meant to dig through HUDs. Wendy brings up what you need, in context, one thing at a time, and it leaves when the moment passes. Asking always works too, and the menu is there as a fallback. This one rule shaped the Vault, the profiles, the input and the phone app below.

Our team comes from games, so quests came naturally, but what is a quest in real life? I started from the meaning: a long, difficult search or journey to find or achieve something important.

Then I split a quest's shape (a line, a branching path, a search) from its theme, the reason it exists. Real life has about ten themes, from goals and adventures to creation, rescue, transformation and legacy, and most real quests layer two: a fitness quest is a Goal and a Transformation; a house hunt is a Mystery and a Rescue. That layering is what makes a quest feel meaningful rather than a checklist.

"Go fishing this Saturday" is a to-do, not a quest. Skills aren't quests either: quests run in a line, but skills branch like a tree, where mastering one branch opens the next, and a skill is the tool you carry forever, not the house you build with it. Wendy decides which is which, so you don't have to, and on a real quest she carries the burden while you do the part that matters.

Two and a half years on Cortana taught me two things I bring to Wendy. First, everyone defines a to-do differently, and not every goal needs a deadline. When every goal in Luminora was becoming a quest on the calendar, I pushed back: knitting, for example, is a hobby to enjoy, and racing a deadline can even cause a repetitive strain injury. Wendy offers structure only when it helps.

Second, people come back to an assistant for small things done well, like reminders and timers. Big work features made Cortana feel built for Microsoft employees, as research participants told us. With Wendy, I push for a few standout features, but never at the cost of the small, everyday wins.

The Vault was a profile to fill in: eleven domains with progress bars and a "Complete" pill. I reframed it as what Wendy knows so she can help you, kept between the two of you: AI memory you can see and control, in plain words, correctable and private by default.

Wendy already had everything she'd learned; she just didn't know what to do with it. So instead of asking engineering for something new, I wrote her instructions: how to sort what she knows into themes, summarise each in her voice, and never show things like your weight, a divorce or a hard childhood. The screens show a made-up person's notes.

Your profile used to be a huge icon that opened onto almost nothing. I turned it into your account plus the place that celebrates your journey with your Lumie: your relationship, days together, gifts from Wendy, achievements and milestones. Wendy's card holds her progression, and Switch Lumie opens a simple overlay that shows profiles only.

The chat input had become a catch-all, with a clock, a notch and shortcuts. I cut it back to talking only: mic, text, send and attach, in one clean pill that stays centred and never slides away when HUDs open. On the phone it works like a messaging app, and the keyboard's return key sends.

On a phone, the desktop stage was simply squeezed in, with HUDs floating over the chat. I rethought it as a chat-first app: Wendy large when you arrive, then the conversation takes over. What she brings up appears as a small card in the thread, and HUDs open as full pages from a menu.

I started with a clickable prototype to test the ideas, like her expression on each message and long answers as one short card, then built it into the app.

There's no finished, boxed version of an AI product. Every person's Wendy behaves a little differently, and people won't use her the exact way we design for. So I push us to ship the core small, learn from real use, and keep evolving, with patterns that hold up however someone talks to her.

Since Cortana, I've believed AI's real power is giving people back time, the most valuable thing we have. Let it handle the mundane things we have to do, so we can spend our lives on what we want: family, friends, play and creativity. Luminora is how I'm designing for that.