About the product

Notewell.ai is a HIPAA-compliant AI platform built for social workers and case managers to streamline client documentation. The platform uses AI to transcribe voice recordings, generate notes based on custom templates, and assist with follow-ups through an integrated AI chat. It aims to reduce social work burden and free up time for deeper client work.

CONTEXT

When I joined, Notewell’s mobile app only supported compliant audio recordings, everything else had to be done on desktop. Yet 60% of users were already relying on mobile in the field. This disconnect created friction: social workers could record sessions on the go, but couldn’t access or complete their notes until returning to their computer.

I was tasked with transforming this limited app into a complete mobile-first experience — translating and rethinking desktop workflows to support how social workers actually work in real life.

Designing Under Real-World Constraints

When we kicked off the project, I worked closely with the founder to define the vision for mobile as a standalone product that could complement and expand the desktop experience. But we faced some tight constraints: a small engineering team, legacy architecture not built for mobile parity, and the need to keep complex workflows effortless on small screens. And since social workers were working with sensitive casework, AI assistance needed to feel transparent, trustworthy, and above all flexible.

Redesigning Home + Navigations for User Workflow

The previous mobile app was little more than a voice recorder - a mic button and minimal navigation, with no structure/access to key content. We redesigned the home screen and navigation around real user behavior — prioritizing recent recordings, the most common starting point for in-field workflows.

We integrated all desktop functionalities. Early in the project, we challenged the need for a standalone ‘Meeting Notes’ tab on mobile. Since practitioners accessed notes almost exclusively from the client they belonged to, we moved Meeting Notes into the Client view — reducing cognitive load and extra navigation.

Faster Client & Meeting Workflows

Originally, viewing a client’s information on desktop meant hopping between separate screens for meetings, action items, and AI chat — making it hard to maintain context. I redesigned the client view with in-page tabs, so all related details lived in one place. This would allow users to switch between meetings, action items, and AI insights instantly, without losing their place. It made the workflow faster, more organized, and allowed AI to work with the full context of a client’s history.

Designing for On-the-Spot FlexibilitY

In Notewell, templates aren’t AI-generated themselves — they’re user-predefined structures that the AI uses to generate answers from a recording. This means the quality of the AI’s output heavily depends on the completeness and relevance of the template.

Previously, due to technical constraints, if users wanted to add new questions to an existing and in-use/used template, there was no way to edit it directly. They had to duplicate the template, then apply those changes to the copy.

Constraint: Changing a master template after it was “in use” created technical risks — updates could ripple into active meeting notes and overwrite existing content. The founder also worried this might confuse users, since they’d be editing a structure already tied to past notes.

Workaround Solution: We introduced the ability to add follow-up questions directly inside a meeting note. These additions applied only to that meeting, leaving the master template untouched. This gave social workers on-the-spot flexibility without risking system stability.

Impact: Even as a interim fix, this change let practitioners capture unexpected topics in real time, ensuring no critical detail was lost — all while working within product and engineering constraints.

Designing for System-Level Changes

Users wanted the option to push newly added follow-up questions from a meeting note into the master template so future meetings could benefit without manual re-entry. However, we had to carefully consider the ripple effects of editing a template already tied to dozens of past notes. Automatically overriding them could alter historical reports and create confusion.

Our solution was to make pushing changes an intentional action and keep past meeting notes frozen — preserving their original content — while allowing the master template itself to evolve.

From there, two flows kept everything in sync:

• In Templates: Pushed updates triggered a “New updates” badge, with inline highlights so users could instantly see what had changed.
• In Meeting Notes: Any past notes tied to that template displayed a “Template updated” notification, letting users apply all updates at once or review them individually.

Visual Language and System Thinking

I built the foundation of Notewell’s mobile design system to ensure consistency, scalability, and a visual language tailored for social workers in the field. Partnering with engineering, I defined the system’s principles, created base components, and established patterns that balanced clarity, accessibility, and warmth.

Faster, Smarter documentation for social workers

The final mobile experience transforms Notewell into a complete, end-to-end companion for social workers in the field. Every workflow, from recording a session to generating meeting notes, surfacing action items, and using the context-driven AI chat, was streamlined for small screens without losing depth.

We positioned AI as a starting point rather than a final answer, always clearly labeled, editable, and tied to the right context. This balance gave social workers both speed and control, ensuring that automation supported their expertise instead of competing with it.

Click here for a deeper look at how we designed AI Chat in Notewell.