Shaped is a self-serve platform that provides API's to power AI-driven recommendations and search. This is most critical to products and platforms that are marketplaces, social media, media consumption, or e-commerce. I was brought on by the founders to support them as their product design capacity. Our work together is ongoing and has primarily focused on re-architecting and redesigning their dashboard to ensure it can scale and support core experiences, providing cohesive design strategy and vision for Q3'24-Q1'25, and supporting them in hiring their first designer.
Together with the team we dove into customer research to understand user needs for both self-serve customers and and white glove customers. Technical customers can use the Shaped APIs via CLI, while less-technical customers can use the dashboard that want to setup, evaluate, and deploy their own recommendation and search models. In the dashboard model results can simulated or queried by user or item id's providing a clear sense of relevance, rank score, comparative model performance and more.
The Shaped Data Catalog is a glanceable and powerful view, allowing users to see the data schema and leveraged datasets in their models and a clear view or the raw data, their top level metrics and health. Shaped has three schema types that are core to how people query. They are users, items, and events. Users will query the API or dashboard by these types when evaluating their model and the relevancy of search or recommendation results. The data catalogue also allows users to also monitor the health and integrity of their models and what data has been ingested and mapped. This is critical to understanding when deployments fail, why a model's performance may suffer, interpreting key metrics more clearly, and more.