Celonis, AI-Driven Process Mining

Product Strategy | Experience Design | Systems Thinking | AI Concepting

Client: Celonis—an enterprise process intelligence platform used by companies like Siemens, Uber, and Mercedes-Benz to analyze and optimize complex operations.

Problem: Celonis Starter Kits were meant to accelerate time to value, but they had become complex and difficult to configure. Users struggled to understand where to start, and the low-code platform made even small UX improvements costly.

Goal: Reduce friction in the current onboarding experience while defining a clearer, more intuitive future direction—including where AI could build user confidence.

Role: Senior Designer over a six-month engagement, working alongside a design lead and creative director. On the Celonis side, we partnered with a VP of Product, a technical lead, and product specialists.

Approach: A dual-track strategy—Near Star improvements within platform constraints, and a North Star vision that reimagined onboarding as a guided, AI-supported experience.

Outcome: Near-term work reduced friction and clarified constraints. The North Star vision aligned teams around a more intuitive future direction and influenced how leadership thought about the product's evolution.

Celonis Starter Kits bundle dashboards, validation tools, and workflows for business functions like Accounts Payable and Procurement. They're meant to help enterprise customers get value quickly—but over time, they had become hard to configure and navigate.

The experience was also built inside Celonis Studio, a low-code environment that limited how much could change in the short term. We needed to improve what existed while defining a smarter long-term direction.

What made this hard

Onboarding required internal expertise to complete

Navigation lacked clear hierarchy

Insights were surfaced but not guided—users didn't know what to do next

Platform constraints made even small improvements costly

Strategic framing

We structured the engagement in two phases:

Phase 1 (Near Star): Improve the existing experience and learn where the real constraints were

Phase 2 (North Star): Step beyond those constraints to define an ideal future

This sequencing let us deliver immediate value while building clarity around what a better experience could look like.

Key North Star concepts

Rather than asking "what can we tweak?" we explored what onboarding would feel like if it were intuitive from the start.

Sample-data onboarding — pre-populated dashboards that let users explore before uploading real data, reducing fear of "doing it wrong"

AI-supported insights — conversational guidance paired with visual evidence, helping users move from insight to action faster

AI was positioned as a collaborator—not a replacement for judgment.

We started with a deep product audit—mapping Starter Kit variations, reviewing user sessions and demo recordings, and annotating friction points and IA breakdowns. We identified where users stalled or required intervention, and reviewed competitor patterns around guided setup.

Key findings: poor discoverability, a noisy and fragmented UI, and layouts that demanded expertise rather than building confidence.

Near Star Improvements

Within Studio constraints, we focused on pragmatic refinements: re-establishing visual hierarchy, improving navigation clarity, reducing noise, and making next steps explicit.

This work stabilized onboarding and surfaced which challenges were incremental versus systemic.

North Star Vision

With clarity around constraints, we stepped back. We reframed onboarding as a guided, exploratory journey focused on helping users quickly understand what the system is doing, why insights matter, and what to do next.

We designed concepts around sample-data onboarding and AI-supported insights—showing how the product could build confidence rather than demand expertise.

Prototyping & Handoff

To bring the vision to life, we built an interactive prototype demonstrating key flows. We used micro-animations to show transitions and system behavior, documented intent and open questions, and supported handoff across product, design, and leadership.

The prototype became a shared artifact for conversation, alignment, and future planning.

This was exploratory vision work—nothing shipped during the engagement. But the concepts directly informed how leadership thought about the product's future direction.

The Near Star work reduced friction and clarified which problems were incremental versus systemic. The North Star vision aligned teams around a clearer, more intuitive future and elevated the perceived maturity of the product.

Challenges

Rigid low-code tooling made even small UX changes costly

A noisy, fragmented UI required re-establishing hierarchy from the ground up

Limited access to end users shaped how feedback was gathered and evaluated

Learnings

Designing within constraints builds clarity, but knowing when to step beyond them is equally important

North Star concepts can be effective tools for alignment when paired with grounded Near Star improvements

AI is most effective when it supports user confidence rather than replacing judgment

Wins

Helped shape a dual-track Near Star + North Star approach

Used design concepts to support internal alignment and shared understanding

Delivered thoughtful UX despite tight technical constraints