Nexu
Role: UX Researcher & Designer
Project Overview: This project started with a simple question: "When AI becomes effortless, do we stop being intentional?" The aim was to explore how everyday AI efficiency shapes user behavior, revealing patterns of overuse, dependency, and invisibility through research. These insights later informed a narrative-driven solution: Nexu, that rethinks how users engage with AI, not by restricting access, but by making usage more conscious and deliberate.
Project Duration: October, 2025 - December, 2025
CONTEXT
As AI becomes faster and easier to use, users increasingly rely on it for a wide range of tasks with little reflection. The outcomes are immediate, but the broader consequences of repeated AI interactions remain unclear, creating a gap between convenience and understanding that warrants further investigation.
AI efficiency often creates a feedback loop where convenience drives habitual use, psychological dependency, and increased consumption. With no visible feedback on AI’s hidden costs, this rebound effect scales unintentionally, showing that the real issue lies not in efficiency, but in how invisible systems shape everyday behaviour.
LITERATURE SYNTHESIS
AI efficiency gains often lead to increased overall usage, unintentionally amplifying environmental impact rather than reducing it.
Think of AI as a perfectly efficient elevator in a busy building. It saves time, effort, and energy, so people start using it more, even for trips they once took the stairs for. Over time, the total number of rides increases so much that the building ends up consuming more energy than before.
This is the essence of Jevons Paradox, when a technology becomes more efficient, its convenience often leads to increased overall consumption rather than reduction. In the context of AI, this manifests as the Rebound Effect, where faster responses and lower friction encourage more frequent interactions, offsetting any intended efficiency gains.
GAPS IDENTIFIED
USER SURVEY
User responses reveal habitual AI use accompanied by rising emotional reliance & limited awareness of its broader implications.
The survey was conducted via Google Form to examine AI usage frequency, emotional reliance, and awareness levels to capture real user behaviours and perceptions. This approach complemented the literature by grounding the research in everyday AI interaction patterns.
INFERENCE
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Everyday AI use is fragmented and excessive, driven by efficiency that encourages repeated tool-switching & habitual reliance causing over-consumption of energy.
AI is no longer used selectively, it is used reflexively. As AI systems become faster and more seamless, the effort required to generate, retry, or switch tools drops to near zero.
This efficiency encourages repeated interactions and parallel tool usage, not because users need more output, but because friction no longer signals cost. Over time, this leads to habitual dependence, inflated usage, and cumulative environmental impact through rebound-driven consumption. The problem, therefore, is not AI adoption itself, but a system that rewards ease without supporting intentional, aware engagement at scale.
IDEATION
FINALIZED SOLUTION 1
A centralized AI aggregator that converts user intent into optimized prompts, routes them to relevant AI tools.
Instead of users manually trying the same prompt across multiple AI tools, the platform interprets the task, refines the prompt, and routes it to the most suitable AI models in the background.
When the system detects urgency or repeated use of the same tool for a prompt type, it directly routes the task to that tool without showing recommendations. A floating action control remains available on the screen, allowing users to switch tools at any point if they want to explore alternatives.
USER FLOW
The translation of user intent into optimized AI outputs through system-led routing and prompt refinement.
Nexu: AI, Minus the Hassle!
NEXU is a responsive platform that simplifies AI usage by refining user prompts, matching them to the most efficient AI tools, and reducing unnecessary system load. Users enter a prompt, modify it through a single click and receive a refined, high-quality output from the best-suited model.
Behind the scenes, similar queries are clustered and duplicates avoided through a smart queue system, preventing repeated processing and lowering environmental impact. The experience delivers fast, accurate results while quietly promoting cleaner, more responsible AI usage.
MOCKUPS
The visual system was adapted responsively to retain balance, spacing, and visual hierarchy across screen sizes.
Nexu’s visual system uses a purplish-blue dark theme to balance technical depth with calmness, reinforcing focus, trust, and continuity across AI-driven interactions.
STYLE GUIDE
FINALIZED SOLUTION 2 : AR EXPERIENCE CENTRE
To build awareness around everyday AI usage by making its scale, presence & influence perceptible through an immersive spatial experience.
The AR experience centre is structured as a controlled walk-through space where visitors engage with AR overlays using handheld devices or head-mounted displays. The space is divided into sequential zones, each highlighting a different aspect of everyday AI interaction
POTENTIAL IMPACT
Nexu could help users navigate AI more easily by reducing tool-hopping and enabling clearer, more confident decision-making.
TAKEAWAY & FAILURE POINTS
This project strengthened my ability to approach AI design challenges through a balance of research rigor, system thinking, and user-centered decision making.
Limited validation of the AR experience centre: Due to time and resource constraints, the experiential layer was not tested with users, leaving its long-term effectiveness as an awareness tool unverified.
Assumptions in tool-routing logic: The aggregation and matching logic is conceptually defined but not backed by real-time model performance data, which may impact accuracy at scale.
CONTINUE EXPLORING
© 2023 Aakriti Srivastava
Research-forward. Design-focused. Let's build what matters.