On the App Store

The notes I take while researching how AI changes product design. Method, not news, straight to your inbox.

Join the AI Product Club

What I learn building with AI becomes practical notes in the club. Method, not news.

This continues in the AI Product Club

In the 1:1 mentorship we take your product, your portfolio or your AI workflow and work on the real case.

Apply this to your own context

The numbers in this article come from my research on accessibility and design systems. The full material, with method and data, is on the research page.

This comes from my research

Touch Grass is live with tokens, components, tests and docs. The portfolio case shows the decisions behind it.

The design system in this article is open source

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Blog: design, product and applied AI

Essays published on Medium and academic research as PDF. These links open outside this site.

Blog

I am preparing this book with Casa do Código to help designers and product teams adopt AI without outsourcing judgment. The draft focuses on practical workflow changes, source validation, ethics, and the parts of design that still need human review.

A Casa do Código book in preparation about design, artificial intelligence, and safer team workflows.

Design in the AI Era (in preparation) - Thiago Xikota

Deciding what AI should help with, and what stays human.

Creative direction

Understanding teams, constraints, and workflow risks before choosing tools.

Context mapping

Using AI to organize evidence without inventing confidence.

Research synthesis

Turning intent into testable UI, content, and process drafts.

Prompting and prototyping

Checking provenance, errors, and hallucinations before work ships.

Source validation

Defining guardrails for data, authorship, accessibility, and impact.

Ethics and safety

The outline can still change. These are the questions guiding the work.

Draft themes

A book in preparation about judgment, ethics, and AI workflows for design teams.

Design in the AI Era

I am preparing a Casa do Código book about how designers and product teams can use artificial intelligence with judgment, ethics, and safer workflows.

The books I write about design, artificial intelligence, and the work of the people who design.

Books

Design progress

This longform case study is currently maintained in Portuguese.

Impact beyond the screen

I design product experiences in real-scale contexts. A designer since 2019, in product design since 2021, across startups, scale-ups, and public products. I care about accessible, well-resolved interfaces with real business impact.

Interested in working together?

What the research revealed

All my certificates and courses, with filters and search.

Certificates & Courses

For recruiters and interviewers: I can walk through process, decisions, and learnings in a private conversation. Reach out on LinkedIn.

Work in progress, under confidentiality

Working on a product that needs design direction or AI in the workflow? Tell me what you're building.

Get in touch

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Send a message

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Let's talk

One note a month on how product people stay relevant when AI already does the easy work. Method, not news.

AI Product Club

Mentorship conversation

Speaking invitation

Research collaboration

Product project

Privacy first

What happens next?

I will review your message and follow up within two business days. If you need a faster reply, feel free to send an email directly.

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Quick chat

Recent coursework across UX research, accessibility, design systems, AI, and front-end implementation.

EF SET English Certificate (C2 Proficient)

Excel Course

Italian Language Course (Level B2)

Intensive Oratory Course

Design Track

Pixel Init - Introduction to Junior Enterprise

Power BI Course

Selective Process Course

Character Design Workshop

Selected certifications that reinforce research, product thinking, interface systems, and technical fluency.

Courses & Certificates

Completed the Italian Language Course (Level B2) at the Pontifical Lateran University in 2025, strengthening communication skills and cultural fluency during my academic period in Rome.

Pontifical Lateran University: Italian Language Course (Level B2)

Exchange in Applied Computer Science and AI at Sapienza University of Rome, focused on AI systems, research, and the technical foundations behind modern workflows.

Sapienza University of Rome: Exchange in Applied Computer Science and AI

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from UFSC, completed in 2026.

Federal University of Santa Catarina: Computer Science

Completed a year of high school in Vancouver, improving English fluency and experiencing cultural exchange through daily academic life in a Canadian environment.

High School in Vancouver, Canada

Formal training, international study, and continuous learning shaped around product, systems, and implementation.

Education

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If design is the passion, fixing links is the plot twist.

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Chapter Lead of The AI Collective Florianópolis, the first chapter in southern Brazil. I organize local conversations, events, and practical learning about AI for people building with artificial intelligence.

Chapter Lead: The AI Collective Florianópolis

Product Designer for Ministry of Education (MEC) solutions. Redesigned critical journeys for a national education app, utilizing the public design system (DSGov) and scaling libraries.

Product Designer: Laboratório Bridge

Led the UI track, mentoring designers and running workshops and video lessons.

Drove rebranding, partnerships, and events that aligned strategy, execution, and design governance.

UX/UI Designer: Pixel - Soluções Digitais

Sole product designer and Lead Product Designer. Worked on the activation redesign that reduced onboarding abandonment from 50% to 25% and supported growth from 0 to 100 paying clients.

Lead Product Designer: Multidrop

Prior product design work at Wellhub (formerly Gympass), a global corporate wellness platform with around 50 million users across 18 countries. I use that experience to explain how large organizations create messy core problems and how AI helps teams tackle them with more leverage.

Global Product Designer: Wellhub (formerly Gympass)

A digital product design and build studio: websites, apps, and design systems, from problem to shipped product, with AI agents under human review.

Founder: Xikota Design

Where I've made impact

Curious minds ask

App, web, and admin system for Jornada do Estudante and Pé-de-Meia, designed at Laboratório Bridge (UFSC) for Brazil's Ministry of Education.

Public education at national scale

End-to-end journeys in the Wellhub app, formerly Gympass, a corporate wellness platform.

Check-in and booking at global scale

A social product published for iPhone, with a documented contribution to product design, visual identity, and motion. The case covers presence, Crowds, channels, and the AI direction without confusing prototypes with releases.

A social network with AI built in

Xikota Design

and Chapter Lead of

I work from problem to production.

AI Product Designer with over 7 years of experience. I specify, design, and build digital products with AI agents, always with human direction and review. Computer Science degree from UFSC, with an exchange in Applied Computer Science and AI at Sapienza University of Rome. Founder of

The AI Collective Florianópolis,

Frameworks, methods, vocabulary, references, and prompts I use with teams when AI needs to survive real review.

The AI design library I use in real work

I work from problem to product in production: research, specification, design, and building with AI agents under human review. Founder of Xikota Design, a digital product design and build studio, and Chapter Lead of The AI Collective Florianópolis.

AI Product Designer and researcher

You're offline

Thiago Xikota is an AI Product Designer: he works from problem to product in production, combining research, specification, design and building with AI agents under human review. A researcher at Lemme (UFSC), he co-authored the study on Specification Literacy and structural convergence that received the Best Paper Award at AIMEDIA 2026 in Nice, France. He is the author of Design na era da IA, in production with Casa do Código, Chapter Lead of The AI Collective Florianópolis and founder of Xikota Design, a digital product design and building studio.

How AI is changing the design profession, and what to do to make it work for the people who design. Talk, workshop, panel, podcast or class. Based in Florianópolis, happy to travel, or remote.

What I bring to the stage

Write me with as much context as you have: event or organization, date, venue or remote format, type of participation, topic, audience and conditions. I reply personally.

Hi, Thiago. I would like to invite you for [type of participation] at [event or organization]. Date: [date]. Venue or format: [venue/remote]. Topic: [topic]. Audience: [who and how many]. Conditions: [conditions].

Research I co-authored (Best Paper Award at AIMEDIA 2026) measured how interfaces generated without specification converge to the same pattern, and what specification changes about that.

Structural convergence: why AI makes everything look the same

Designers building product with AI agents, with judgment and human review. Current tools as the vehicle, principles as the subject.

From design to shipped product

What I learned auditing public design systems (277 non-conformities in my thesis, top grade) and ensuring WCAG 2.1 AA conformance in a global-scale product.

Accessibility as an acceptance criterion

The argument I am developing in the book Design na era da IA, in production with Casa do Código.

The designer career in the AI era

Public education product for the Ministry of Education's national student network.

Bridge - MEC

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Confidential case study

DSGov, the Brazilian government's design system, failed 8+ WCAG 2.1 AA criteria. I fixed it in code with the devs: semantic HTML, ARIA and focus order, without changing a single pixel of the spec. The clarity came in the invisible layer: keyboard navigation, screen readers, states that announce themselves properly. Accessibility isn't compliance. It's a design tool.

Constraints force clarity

At Bridge, on a platform with 14 million users, the Pé-de-Meia student benefit had 8+ possible eligibility statuses, 6 of them genuinely ambiguous. A good share of helpdesk tickets boiled down to "I don't understand my status". At Multidrop, the context switcher was buried in settings, so users worked in the wrong context without noticing. I design for the scenarios most people ignore.

Edge cases at scale are millions of people

At Multidrop, I built the design system from scratch: color, spacing and type tokens, the grid, governance shared with engineering. It was the precondition for two very different user types to coexist in one product. A good design system changes how the whole team makes UI decisions, not just how the screen looks.

Systems outlast screens

How I think about design

What this site collects, why, on what legal basis, and for how long. Written straight from the site's code.

Privacy

I'm Thiago, a product designer born and raised on the island of Florianópolis, in southern Brazil, in a Japanese-Brazilian family (yonsei, fourth generation). I like understanding how things work and questioning what seems obvious. I spend my days turning messy problems into products people can actually use.

I started in design in 2019, before AI became a mandatory topic. Since then I've worked at Wellhub, Multidrop and Laboratório Bridge, where I helped design a platform for Brazil's Ministry of Education used by millions of students. I earned my degree in Computer Science at UFSC, with an exchange in applied computer science and AI at Sapienza, in Rome.

These days my work mixes design, product, code and AI. Not because I think every designer needs to become a developer, but because I like closing the gap between an idea and something working in the world.

I'm also the founder of Xikota Design, my design studio, and I lead The AI Collective Florianópolis, the first chapter in southern Brazil. I do research at UFSC, I'm writing a book (on its way with Casa do Código) and, in my free time, I teach Japanese music to young people at the local Japanese association.

About me

Explore some of my highlight projects that showcase my design approach and problem-solving skills.

Featured Projects

Landing page for a non-profit organization that brings international students to the Vatican City to study Canon Law. The project focused on product design, UX, and UI to create an inviting, accessible, and informative digital presence.

Academia Canônica

Three years in the ecosystem of the Ministry of Education's app, designed at the Bridge Lab. The Pé-de-Meia form with auto-save, dedicated screens per eligibility state, and 277 WCAG violations mapped in my thesis.

Jornada do Estudante: MEC's app used across Brazil

Volunteer project creating graphic materials for the Kadampa Meditation Center in Florianópolis. The work focused on visual communication for events, classes, and community outreach.

Kadampa Meditation Center (CMK) Florianópolis

A collaborative project between three junior enterprises to design and develop a web-based system for creating and managing nutritional sheets. My focus was on product design, user experience, and interface design for nutrition professionals.

EuTech - Nutritional Sheets Platform

E-commerce platform specializing in retro games. I was responsible for the entire product design process, including branding, graphic materials (Instagram posts, stories), wireframes, and all UX/UI design for the online store.

Kanto dos Jogos - Retro Games E-commerce

Branding and logo design project for Libera Já, a digital platform. Responsible for creating the visual identity, including logo, color palette, and brand guidelines to ensure a strong and memorable presence.

Libera Já - Branding & Logo Design

Sole product designer at a German SaaS. Activation redesign: onboarding abandonment from 50% to 25%, customer base from 0 to 100 paying clients, and €14M in sales in the first year.

Multidrop: measuring activation through revenue

Product Designer at PariPassu from July to October 2025. A design system built from scratch, with more than 110 components, serving the Rastreador and CliCQ products.

PariPassu: a design system from scratch

Served as Marketing Director at Pixel, a junior enterprise. Supervised the company's rebranding, created graphic arts for Instagram, managed email marketing, and led the visual communication strategy.

Pixel - Junior Enterprise Marketing & Branding

A local marketplace for clients, professionals, and businesses, with social discovery, real-time translation, PIN confirmation, and a real-estate vertical prepared for handoff.

Samba: local services across languages and contexts

Tonight is an events app designed to help users discover, personalize, and attend parties and events. Users can sign up, set their preferences for event types, browse all available events, buy tickets, view venues, share event links, and manage their profiles. The app also features an admin system for event organizers to add and manage events.

Tonight - Events App

Open source design system built in 48h, with Claude Code as the working operating system. 18 tested components, a clean accessibility audit, and tokens for 4 platforms, published on npm as v1.0.0 (MIT). It is the visual base of Timeouts, my iOS social gym for time away from the phone.

Touch Grass: a design system in 48h with Claude Code

Global Product Designer at Wellhub from June 2025 to June 2026, working on complete product journeys in a global corporate wellness platform with about 50 million users across 18 countries.

Wellhub

An iOS social network with a feed, local presence, Crowds, channels, chat, and an AI layer specified inside the product. The case separates what is published from what remains product direction.

Yankee: a social network designed as a system

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Yankee, Multidrop, and Bridge lead the selection for different reasons: social product and AI, activation tied to business, and accessible public service at scale. Wellhub and PariPassu cover global products and interface systems.

This outdated version of the portfolio is no longer published. The current work is available on the projects page.

Retired case | Thiago Xikota

This case has been retired

Case studies with documented decisions: Yankee, Multidrop, Jornada do Estudante, Wellhub, and PariPassu. Social products, activation, public services, accessibility, and systems.

Certificates & Courses

IAUX Lab, 2nd Edition

UX Unicórnio Certificate

Italian Language Course (Level B2)

UX Foundations: Research

UX Foundations: Usability Testing

UX Foundations: Accessibility

UX Foundations: Interaction Design

UX Foundations: Multidevice Design

UX Foundations: Style Guides and Design Systems

Spanish for Absolute Beginners

Figma for UX Design

Figma: Teams, Stakeholders, and Design Reviews

Using AI in the UX Design Process

Design Psychology: Master the Art and Science of UX Design

Design Thinking: Methodology, Stages, and Applications

The AI-Driven Product Designer

Introduction to AI Ethics and Safety

Prompt Engineering: How to Talk to AIs

Building a Personalized Chatbot with OpenAI and LangChain

Practical GitHub Actions

UI/UX Design Course