Designing Maia by Make: A co-worker that turns words into workflows in front of you

As a Senior Product Designer, I follow a lot of the incredible workflows being built in Make. Still, I know that the technical barrier is high. Not everyone has time to ask LLM for help before seeing any payoff. 

The Make team wanted something that lowers that barrier to guide people through building instead of pointing them at learning materials. 

That's how we landed on a building co-worker: someone who sits with you on the canvas, gets what you're trying to do, and builds it with you instead of just answering questions in a chat box.

I came in to cover product design, UX, and interaction. I defined Maia as a character: her look, her feel, how she talks to users. I also designed the rest of the interface, like her entry points and the UI that makes it clear what she's doing and why.

Here’s the story of designing Maia. 

Why does an AI co-worker need a character?

You may be thinking: AI is here to make our jobs easier. Why does it matter how it looks? Now, take a moment to think. Yes, AI revolutionizes the way we work, but do you really trust it? 

Many people don’t, because it’s hard to trust a black box. 

That’s why I didn’t want Maia to be yet another plain chat window. It tells you nothing about what is happening in the background: no visibility into what’s being built, just a result you don’t understand. It’s hard to trust a system like this with something important.

As a tool, Maia was designed to be a glass box. Building visually and transparently, right in front of you. How she looks and acts had to mirror that perfectly.

Each Maia’s move is deliberate

I wanted Maia to feel like an actual character with a real personality, someone who talks to you with more than words: a morphing abstract shape that changes based on what she's doing.

That movement isn't random. Once she starts working on your workflow, cues tell you she's on it and you can relax: the background shifts, the toolbar disables. She shows up next to the module she's working on, pulsing it and narrating actions through a speech bubble. 

Her shape shifts with every action: idle, thinking, working, done.

She talks you through what she's doing, then walks you through it in chat once she's finished, so you can tweak things. Maia collaborates with you every step of the way, so you stay in control of your own job.

With Maia, not knowing feels okay

Building the workflow is only half of what Maia does as a tool. She troubleshoots with you. Tells you why something doesn’t work, gives advice on a fix, and explains workflows you didn’t build yourself. 

The character makes it more human. Maia is the friendly avatar, a co-worker sitting next to you. Instead of a you versus an all-knowing algorithm, you feel like asking a friendly, more experienced colleague. 

Simply put, Maia changes "I don't know why this is broken" from something you may avoid to admit into something you just ask.

What I've build with Maia: Customer insights shipped to Slack

Part of my job is turning customer interviews into something the product team can act on: rewatching the recording, pulling the transcript, deciding what mattered. 

It used to cost me the better part of a day, every time.

Now I just tell Maia what I want: summarize the top three topics from a transcript in my Drive folder, with quotes and action points, post it to Slack formatted so people actually read it, and draft a thank-you email in Gmail for me to review.

She hands me a plan first, then I watch her build: Drive, Docs, an analysis step, Slack, Gmail, pausing to ask for the one detail only I can give her. I check her work myself, run it, and it matches what I asked for. She tells me what she'd improve next time.

A co-worker that grows with you

What makes Maia unique is the character itself. Not only how she moves, acts, and feels. Her way she’s designed gives her growth no borders. She feels young and exciting, someone who evolves next to you as she learns more about your automations. 

A glass box. Not a black box. That's what Maia was always meant to be.