matt johnson
arta AI sidekick
AI-Native UX
scroll to see more
Product
Arta is a fintech startup that raised $90M+ to build next-generation investing tools for the mass-affluent — a family office for the rest of us. As founding and lead designer, I shaped multiple experiences, built the brand, and established a culture of craft that raised the bar for how consumer investing products look and feel.
Arta AI is the company's retail and B2B play – no accreditation requirements, no regulatory floors. Built around a powerful in-house AI Sidekick, it brings the sophisticated portfolio reporting and market intelligence of Arta Wealth to any investor looking to sharpen their edge.
Opportunity
Today's leading LLMs can discuss markets and offer generic investing guidance, but none can reason across your actual holdings or present portfolio and market data with the clarity and precision that real financial decisions require. General-purpose AI wasn't built for the time-sensitive, multi-asset complexity of personal wealth. Arta AI was.
CONTRIBUTIONS
Designed end-to-end text & voice centered agentic product
Shaped AI agent's personality, tone, and user-configurable parameters/behavior
Contributed front-end code directly, shipping and iterating in collaboration with AI dev tooling
Defined a distinctive sub-brand & visual language within the larger Arta brand architecture
BIG TAKEAWAY
Designing for AI isn’t about making the AI feel smart – it’s about making the user feel smarter.
DetAils
Company
:
Arta Finance
Role
:
Product Lead & Founding Designer
Timeframe
:
2025 Q3 – 2026 Q1
Arta's Sidekick is the central hero of Arta AI – an always-on agent users can task with proactively watching, reporting on, and providing insights across real or hypothetical portfolios. Present in nearly every screen, a core UX challenge was ensuring users could naturally (a) reference portfolios, assets, tasks, or sources while engaging with Sidekick, and (b) invoke Sidekick contextually to scope and focus an interaction.
Beyond the interaction model, I defined the Sidekick's personality and crafted a distinct graphic & motion language that signals the agent's presence/availability while consistently attributing AI-generated content woven throughout the experience to your Sidekick.
Arta AI broadened the data sources that power Arta Wealth with market data from new asset classes like mutual funds & crypto and new internally trained AI models. An explicit design goal was to embrace data density rather than hide it. We relied on a solid information hierarchy and visual design to make complex, multi-source data legible whether users are digging deep on a large screen or scanning on the go. Progressive disclosure of more complex terms and visualizations and encouraging the use of Sidekick, we built a UI that rewards the power user without overwhelming the casual one.
Beyond retail investors, Arta AI's reporting depth and AI infrastructure attracted clear demand from professional and institutional clients. We designed two additional tiers to meet it:
Advisor | Enables advisors to manage client accounts and portfolios, with reporting UI and tone tailored to each client's financial sophistication. Learn more |
|---|---|
Institutional | Modular front and back-end architecture allow Arta to sell and integrate AI and asset reporting functionality directly into existing Private Bank or advisor platforms. Learn more |
more from Arta
want a demo or
deeper dive?
Hit me up for a demo or a more nuanced discussion about my work.