Reclaim | Portfolio of Katie Blackman

Katie Blackman

An AI calendar that defends your time

Nov 2020 - Aug 2026 • Acquired by Dropbox • View Site

Reclaim is an AI calendar assistant that schedules focus time, meetings, & tasks automatically, helping users spend time on what matters most.

Mission

Help users proactively optimize their time by scheduling focus time, important habits, & tasks automatically.

My role

I contributed to product, UX design, and front-end development across the app experience. I helped build all of the core scheduling features and AI flows.

Process

At Craftsy I learned Barbara Minto's SCQA framework: Situation, Complication, Question, Answer. And, I still use it to frame problems including the case studies below. My process always varied by project, but it usually looked something like this:

Situation
What do we know today?
Complication
What are we hearing from users and what are we curious about?
Goals, "How might we...?"
Where do we want to go?
Discovery sketches & wireframes
What does it look like? How can we simplify?
Mocks, AI prototyping, development
These often overlapped & depended on the amount of time we had.
Soft-launch, polish
The code landed in production behind a feature-flag so that the team could test it ourselves and with users.
Launch
Removed the feature flag. Then we listened, refined, and iterated.

Feedback from users, product, and engineering could show up at any step. If I was at a good stopping point or getting in too deep, I'd gather feedback. Sometimes I'd get lucky and users would write in about the exact issue I was already working on, so I'd get on a call with them.

01 Case Study

Recommendations

Situation
Users received a daily email with their agenda and recommended fixes for issues on their calendar.

Complication
The email linked them right into the app, which auto-applied those recommendations to save them a step. Instead of feeling helped, they were confused. The calendar had changed and they didn't know why. My favorite critic sent a 30min Loom detailing their distaste for it.

Actions
Instead of applying recommendations for them, we gave users more control. We suggested the recommended action and also gave them options to change it another way or ignore the issue altogether. We also pulled recommendations into the Issues section to round out the experience.

Results
I showed the prototype to people who'd been confused by the old flow, and they preferred having the choice. Getting the user in the loop helped them understand the product better. Our most vocal user even smiled about it, becoming a design partner on future features.

"Katie is genuinely one of the best and most versatile designers I've ever worked with. I'm constantly inspired by her customer obsession, attention to detail, and incredible design taste."

— Former teammate

02 Case Study

Onboarding

Situation
Onboarding was always very successful: 80% of users were getting through it. When we shipped 2.0 with Preview Mode, the old onboarding flow no longer reflected the product.

Complication
A common piece of feedback we were receiving was that users finished onboarding and wondered how Reclaim events had ended up on their calendar. They'd set up features in the flow without realizing each one added events to their calendar. We wanted to show them their actual calendar during onboarding, but we couldn't with the old flow due to limitations.

Preview Mode on

Preview Mode off

Actions
Our new feature, Preview Mode, changed everything. We realized we could drop the pre-product onboarding and move setup right into the app. After connecting their accounts, new users could land in the app already in Preview Mode, get the same feature suggestions as before (in a modal), and see events appear on their calendar in real time. Only this time, they could see it in action, change it if needed, then commit.

Results
Users were no longer surprised by new events landing on their calendar after onboarding. And they were trying out features in their own schedule, making them much easier to understand. Pre-product onboarding was reduced to two steps.

Where it is today

Reclaim is trusted by hundreds of thousands of users across tens of thousands of companies. After being acquired by Dropbox, the product continues to evolve as the #1 AI calendar for work.

Visit Reclaim

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