Sent to you by Dayton Kelly
Note to reader: I truly appreciate you taking the time to read my letter
Hey, I’m Dayton-
I’m a product designer, student and researcher who is dedicated to the craft of human-centered product building. On a personal level, I'm ambitious about living a fulfilling and healthy life.
I'm writing to express my genuine interest and passion for joining Anthropic's mission.
A quick outline for this letter:
Highlights from my background
(2024)
Built a product that uses AI to analyze human intelligence (specifically product designers)
Designed the entire concept myself
Wrote the prompt that analyzes human inputs
Interviewed 40 design leaders and design recruiters to fuel product decisions and understand their sentiment towards AI
(2021-2024)
Led innovative projects at Publicis Sapient
Led a cross-functional team of 3 designers and 2 engineers to spearhead the company’s first Apple Vision Pro R&D initiative
Drove UX efforts for XR and blockchain projects, resulting in $4.7M in revenue and recognition through multiple industry awards
Designed and shipped several enterprise products and websites
(2022)
Published HCI research that got accepted into the CHI conference
Academic research sponsored by Snapchat
Augmented reality for activism
(2020-2021)
Led design and research for an early stage AI digital health startup
Collaborated closely with the CEO, CTO, and board members to design a compelling prototype, directly contributing to securing $225K in pre-seed funding
Interviewed families to understand how predictive AI can spur better health outcomes for aging seniors
Why I am passionate about Anthropic
While working on side projects with the LLM APIs, I found myself spending a lot of time prompt engineering to get the right outputs.
I appreciated how easy it was to get started in playground environments, but over time, I found it increasingly challenging to get the LLM to do exactly what I needed. This is an area where I believe design has tremendous potential to enhance the technology behind the API by making the developer experience easier to master and more intuitive. What excites me most is the chance to design experiences that make interacting with the model/API layer of AI, easier.
In June 2023, I wrote an article titled Why Product Designers Need to Care About AI, where I explored how AI companies would onboard the first billion AI users. Since then, I’ve come to realize that it won't be a billion Claude or ChatGPT users, rather it will be a billion users that are interacting with products that leverage AI APIs.
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Every time I watch a demo video from Anthropic, especially the recent one for the release of Artifacts, it's clear how deeply the team values intuitive and human centered solutions even when the product space is so technical. I would be honored to contribute to a company so deeply committed to a human-centered mission.
AI things I'm thinking about
How might we design a developer experience that reduces time-to-mastery?
How might design help people write better prompts? Better prompts = better outcomes = more trust and adoption
Exploring UI patterns that enable a rich experience in no-code model fine-tuning.
How can AI agents become more accessible for people to build with?
How might AI integrations enable healthier living?
Young people and smart phones - mental health
Learning about ourselves through our data
Thank you so much for reading my letter.
- Dayton