Sber Salut
I led design of the first-generation smart display experience and AI ecosystem for Sber Devices, shaping intuitive voice & touch interactions across a multi-platform ecosystem.
Tenure: Dec 2019 – Dec 2020
Platforms: Mobile & Smart Devices
Collaboration: Partnered with the CTO and senior stakeholders to define product vision, interaction strategy, and prototype the core experience.
Number of users: ~20–30 million MAU
Case studies: Sber Salut AI assistant design and integrating it into ecosystem of products (both case studies provided below)
Leadership Impact & Strategic Outcomes
- Catalyzed Idea → Implementation: Joined at concept stage and drove product strategy through rapid execution to meet tight launch timelines.
- AI-first Interaction Design: Defined and integrated voice and gesture-first AI assistant experiences as a foundational interaction model across services (music, content, groceries, smart home control).
- Reusable Design Systems: Architected scalable user flows and IA that accommodated reuse across mobile, tablet, and TV form factors, enabling coherent multi-screen experiences.
- Cross-functional Alignment: Communicated strategic design decisions that aligned product, engineering, and business objectives, building stakeholder confidence and accelerating decision cycles.
Core Responsibilities & Outcomes
- Market & Competitive Insight: Conducted market research and competitor analysis (e.g., Google Nest Hub, Amazon Echo) to benchmark and differentiate SberPortal’s UX approach.
- User Understanding & Persona Definition: Synthesized user habits and task patterns to inform design of context-aware interactions and flows.
- Interaction & Flow Design: Designed complex multi-modal user flows (voice, touch, gesture) for key tasks like content playback, grocery orders, ride hails, and continuous AI engagement.
- Prototyping & Concept Evaluation: Developed mid-fidelity wireframes to validate interaction assumptions with internal teams, reducing risk before high-fidelity investments.
- Art Direction & Handoff: Guided visual design teams and translated design intent into high-fidelity artifacts with clear specifications for engineering build.
Tools & Methods
Figma, Miro; various usability testing tools and analytics tools to collecting metrics such as task completion, drop-off analysis, early NPS, heatmaps to explore engagement patterns
Case study: Sber Salut, first AI assistant
Back in 2019, Sber CEO, German Gref, had a very ambitious idea. He wanted to turn a huge but very old-fashioned national bank into innovative organization that will set trends. And he wanted to do it using the most powerful thing, artificial intelligence. And yes, that was before OpenAI with ChatGPT become a thing.
Sber put a bet on its new AI assistant, Salut. Salut should be smart enough to work on various tasks, from finance operations to everyday tasks.
And I was invited to shape the future of AI.
I was responsible for design of the initial version of the Sber Salut, and created many user flow that later become a core experience of this product. Example include both hand-on flows such as health check:
As well as setup phase, that includes onboarding and learning about users and their preferences.
This project was extremely challenging (and super interesting at the same time). And below I want to share a few important challenges that I overcome during design process:
Challenge 1 - Finding right visual and functional language
Since Salut was designed from scratch, it was important to use visual language that:
A. Will convey the feeling that Sber is innovative company
B. Will be familiar to the Sber customers (and company had 100 million of active users)
This resulted in a pretty intense design exploration phase, during which I went together with my team from basic look and feel like the one you see below:
To new, innovative look-and-feel. The process was build-measure-learn where I've tested new screens with a small group of business owners and beta testers to collect their opinions on design.
Challenge 2 - Integrating Ster Salut into existing ecosystem of Sber products
Sber had impressive ecosystem of products that already existed before Salut. It was important to make Salut a natural part of existing catalogue of products :
As well as making it relevant in specific context (such as music player):
