Why Fuselab Creative maps data before designing screens
Marc Caposino, Founder & CEO of Fuselab Creative, co-founded the UI/UX design and digital product agency in 2017. The conversation traces its shift from broad design work to complex data projects, and explains how the team approaches regulated industries and AI products.
Fuselab’s move toward complex data work shows the value of choosing a specific industry and learning its rules before designing. For AI products, a central challenge is making uncertain outputs understandable and giving users ways to recover when things go wrong.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I founded Fuselab Creative in 2017 with co-founder George Railean in McLean, Virginia, after more than 20 years in design and communications. We design AI interfaces, enterprise dashboards and software for regulated industries like healthcare, government and finance. What sets us apart is that we design the data layer, not just the screens, and senior people run every project.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Fuselab started out doing a wide range of design work, from websites and social media campaigns to branding, for organizations in almost every industry. That early work built a base of long-term clients, and today about half our clients renew or come back for more work. New business comes from repeat clients, our reviews on Clutch, GoodFirms and Google.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision that shaped us most was to narrow our focus to making complex data usable, especially in healthcare, which took at least half our time by 2022 and is now our deepest practice. The biggest lesson was that clients in regulated fields need a partner who understands their data and rules from day one. That’s why we now map the data before we design a single screen.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
AI changed our industry more in two years than anything before it. Clients now want AI built into their products, and they expect working prototypes fast instead of static mockups. AI interface design is now our fastest-growing practice, and because AI answers aren’t predictable, we design confidence cues, fallback states and recovery paths so people can trust the product.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Pick one industry and learn its data and its rules, because clients in healthcare or government pay for someone who already understands compliance and accessibility. Ignore the “AI will replace designers” panic and the chase for design awards. The hard problem in AI products is rarely the model; it’s making the product clear and trustworthy for the person using it.
Thank you to Marc Caposino and the team at Fuselab Creative for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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