Included Health | AI Agent

Designing and launching Dot, our AI assistant

Animation

Visual Design

Role: Sole designer and animator Scope: Name, avatar, motion system and experience principles Tools: Lottie, Principle Launched: 2023 Result: Grew into the center of Included Health’s AI ecosystem by 2025

Designing and launching Dot, our AI assistant

Overview

In 2023 Included Health set out to launch a member-facing AI assistant. Members bring stressful, personal questions to healthcare, so a generic chatbot would cost us trust on day one.

The assistant needed an identity that felt approachable and clinical at the same time, and a design system that could grow from one chat window into a product-wide ecosystem.

Early explorations of our initial chatbot “Hearty,” where we tested how different heart motifs could express warmth, energy, and care. These studies experimented with visual cues like smiles, lightning bolts, pulses, and medical symbols to strike the right balance between approachability and trust.

The lesson I bring to any team: give an AI product a clear identity and rules, and members will trust what it says.

My role

I was the sole designer and animator on Dot from naming through launch, and I still shape how it shows up across the product.

Led naming exploration (Hearty, Lumi, Wells) to the final name, Dot.
Designed the avatar, motion language and visual identity, built from the Included Health logo.
Introduced storyboards and animatics so the team could critique motion before production.
Shipped production motion in Lottie and wrote Dot’s experience principles for progress, personality and transparency.

Visual experimentation for “Dot,” exploring directions from humanoid forms to organic shapes and ripple effects. The final version, shown on the right, was inspired by our company logo and reimagined its dots as the foundation for our AI character.

A storyboard imagining how Dot could transform into different medical illustrations to communicate a range of messages — from general assistance to health insights and progress updates.

The debut animation for Dot showed how it could shift between states like loading, thinking, and listening. It was shared with senior leadership to inspire excitement about the creative potential of a more expressive assistant.

Dot’s animation system in context shows how it reacts when thinking, finding an answer, or coming up short. These moments give Dot personality and make interactions feel more human.

Animated onboarding bottom sheet showing Dot transferring you to the care team member best suited to your needs. I kept the visuals abstract to remain flexible while the experience was still being defined.

Approach

Three decisions defined Dot, and they still hold in 2025 as I design its first session with members:

Motion carries meaning, not decoration. Every state, from listening to thinking to coming up short, has its own movement, so members always know what Dot is doing.
Free text over quick-reply pills. Showing too many buttons makes Dot read as a traditional chatbot, so the first session leads with the member’s own words.
Conversation rules the whole team follows. One paragraph per message, no dead ends, cards always introduced, and Dot is always “it”, never gendered.

Solution

Impact

Launched in 2023 and grew into the center of Included Health’s AI ecosystem by 2025.
Now explains plan details during Open Enrollment, summarizes visits for providers and suggests more affordable medications.
Storyboards and Lottie shortened design-to-development cycles and gave product and engineering a shared language for motion.

A branded avatar became the foundation for every AI experience we build.

See more of my work

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