Firefly Lumi
Designing a next-generation insights GPT for an niche business intelligence company.
Sidenav was engaged to help conceptualise an idea to create a natural-language data querying tool for a niche business insights platform. Through our deep knowledge of user experience and interaction design, we helped designed a GPT-style interface years before GPT’s were public knowledge.

Firefly BI
Product Design
UX Design
UI Design
Overview
FireflyBI was pioneering a new data processing and business insights platform used by organisation with complex, fragmented data source.
Our deep knowledge of user experience and working with complex requirements was instrumental in conceptualising a GPT-style ‘chat’ interface for non-technical users to ‘talk to data’. We named it Firefly Lumi – a riff on the idea of illuminating data in new ways.
Challenge
Firefly Lumi was conceived before ChatGPT or other chat-based AI tools existed, so there was no good reference in the market to use at the time.
The primary challenge was to find an intuitive approach to querying insights across a complex data set and get simple, understandable insights back which could then be used to build reports or refine.
Solution
Leveraging our expertise in user experience and interaction design, we took a multi-faceted approach to create the concept:
Architected a series a typical request/response playbacks
Designed a chat-based UI for data interaction with simple ‘ask to start’
Designed framework for history and ‘pick up where you left off’
Designed support mechanics for collaboration, integrations, and reporting
Results
Our focus on intuitive user experience and high-fidelity concepts helped the Firefly team to:
Secure additional funding
Gain feedback from current clients
Inform their roadmap for the next year
Maintain a position of market innovation