Nicole Warner

About Nicole Warner

Before “agentic AI” was in everyone’s roadmap, I was already designing for it.BFA in Communication Design, minor in Cultural Anthropology. One taught me to make things clear. The other taught me why that’s harder when the system on the other end isn’t human. I moved into UX in 2016 and AI design almost immediately — that’s where the hard problems lived.In 2017 I designed Helix, a conversational AI companion for preschoolers, before most designers took AI seriously as a UX problem. At Citigroup I built CitiBot Financial Coach and developed trust frameworks for financial AI. At AWS I lead design for AI products at developer scale — interaction patterns for uncertainty, transparency, and human oversight in systems that reason and act, not just respond.That’s the problem I find most interesting: what does good design look like when AI has real autonomy and real consequences if the human loses the thread?I write about it at Staying Brilliantly Human on Substack — because this field needs more honest conversation about collaborating with AI without outsourcing your thinking to it.

Experience

1. Senior Ux Designer - Studio X

   Amazon Web Services (AWS)

   Nov 2021 — Present · US

   I design and ship human-AI systems that improve developer productivity while preserving user agency, reliability, and trust.Product Delivery• Led UX for Amazon Q (2023) from early concept through beta and launch, establishing interaction patterns for LLM-powered assistance across AWS Console and documentation• Designed and shipped AWS Chatbot workflows for incident management in Slack and Microsoft Teams• Created contextual assistance and task orchestration flows for common operational workflowsAI Systems & Reliability• Partnered with engineering and applied science teams to design trust markers, uncertainty disclosures, and fallback patterns for low-confidence outputs• Established escalation workflows for high-risk operational use cases• Designed grounding and source attribution patterns to improve response reliability• Integrated evaluation and user feedback into iterative design cyclesDesign at Scale• Built reusable interaction components and design systems adopted across multiple AI products• Developed service blueprints mapping system dependencies and user touchpoints• Reduced rework through standardized validation and handoff workflowsHuman-Centered & Responsible AI• Designed human-in-the-loop workflows supporting review, override, and escalation• Contributed to cross-functional reviews on reliability, misuse prevention, and sensitive data handling• Embedded transparency and consent patterns into AI-supported workflowsDesign Practice• Conducted usability research with technical and non-technical users• Rapidly prototyped and evaluated new interaction models using emerging AI tools• Mentored designers on responsible AI and systems thinking

Education

• University of North Texas

  BFA, Communication Design

  1999 — 2004

• MIT Professional Education

  No Code AI and Machine Larning

• Southern Methodist University

  CAPE UX Certification

  2016 — 2017