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Nobel
I love reading articles and research papers but found it tough to understand and look for useful sources. So my friends and I built Nobel, an AI powered research assistant for Chrome.
Role
Co-Founder, Head of Product Design
Timeline
Feb - Mar, 2023
Skills
User research, Product design, Interaction design
Prompting is terrible UX and since most don't know how to prompt well, they'll never get the best answers.
So, how do we fill in gaps of knowledge to prevent excessive confusion and search fatigue, while incentivizing users to learn and research independently?
We interviewed 32 people in various disciplines and backgrounds. Here's some notable insights:
User Research Takeaways
1.
It's time consuming to find relevant sources
2.
Users frequently look for sources to fill gaps in knowledge
3.
Insights users look for evolves. Once users roughly understand a topic, they look for specific insights (e.g. Methodologies, direction, etc.). Overtime, only niche parts of papers are useful.
User Problem
Research is a cycle of trial and error searching and reading, where you hope to find some relevant insight that fits your current understanding.
Design Goal
Develop a tool for independent study that fills gaps of knowledge – clarify information and guide them to new relevant sources.
Extension vs. Web
Chrome extensions best fit with our goals as they are present in the research journey -- browsing, reading, etc.
Constraints & Scope
We wanted to in 2 weeks so designs had to service users and the development timeline. Here's our initial feature sets:
* We built in public so check out our updates list
Feature #1 / Navigation Widget
[1]
Here's what the navigation widget looks like in action. It expands upon hover, revealing a Close button
Feature #2 / Enhanced Search
[2]
Enhanced Search gives you the most relevant keywords you might not know, with definitions, recommended papers, and search queries
[3]
Enhance your search at the start or mid-search!
Feature #3 / Summarize Page
[4]
Summarize pages to see how relevant it is
Feature #4 / Explain & Rephrase
[5]
As research evolves, users look for smaller details. This feature gives more granularity over summaries.
Feature #5 / Deep Dive
[6]
Deep dive on an article or highlighted section! We use boxes to divide sections and create a visual distinction from the Enhanced Search modal
Feature #6 / Interaction Design
[7]
Explain Selection defaults to gray and un-clickable until a user highlights a section
[8]
We made opening, expanding, and moving the extension super satisfying!
[9]
To indicate that feedback has been submitted, it first loads then turns into a check mark icon
[10]
We wanted the website to welcome you into this journey while having that same satisfaction. So, we used rhythm to achieve that. Not bad for only 30 minutes of design and development work
* All pictures contain accurate results and representations of the product
Google Enters the Market
We stopped working on Nobel due to increasing competitors who had great distribution -- Google Bard, Arc Browser, etc. When they launched months later, it was validating to see that our designs paralleled theirs; they have similar features and designs (especially the UX) from AI in search, highlight and rephrase, etc.
Lessons
Our launch taught me that different user types can lead to very different optimal features.
I always assumed that people would prefer competitors like PDF.ai because it was more convenient to be spoon-fed with answers. But our users were different, they wanted to improve their learning process.
