Designing an AI-First Career Platform: UX Lessons from Building AissenceAI

Designing an AI-First Career Platform: UX Lessons from Building AissenceAI Designing a real-time AI interface for high-stakes situations like live job interviews presents unique UX challenges. After 18 months of building AissenceAI, here are the 7 most important UX lessons. Lesson 1: Speed IS the UX At 500ms, users lose focus. At 116ms, the AI response appears "already there." We optimized for perceived speed with character-by-character streaming. See our engineering approach to 116ms. Lesson 2: The Overlay Must Be Invisible The overlay must be visible to the user but invisible to screen capture. Our Stealth Mode uses Tauri 2 native screen capture exclusion - the overlay is excluded at the OS level. Lesson 3: Progressive Disclosure New users see a simple answer panel. Power users unlock model selection, custom prompts, dual-layer AI. Complexity is earned, never imposed. Lesson 4: Design for Anxiety Interview candidates are stressed. Large readable text (viewed from 2-3 feet). No red co