Mobile Application
Sep – Dec 2023
Personal knowledge management
Zettel is a note-taking solution empowering you with natural language processing · 🏆 Innovation Sandbox 2023 winner
Responsibilities
0 to 1 Startup Development:
· Market Research
· Users Research
· User Interview
· Competitive Analysis
· Story Map
· Wireframes
· UI Design
· Illustrations
· Prototypes
· Pitch Deck
· Pitching
Role
· Owner
· Product Designer
Results
🏆 1st prize in Coherent Solutions Innovation Sandbox - Autumn Batch 2023
User Interface
Onboarding flow
Onboarding flow: from downloading app to opening your canvas
Creating a first record
Chat-like UI helps to focus only on the message at the current moment. Add AI-suggested tags right away.
Creating new records
Create nested records. Continue adding your thoughts with analysis of existing context.
AI suggestions
Semantic connection suggestions over time. The system goes through your records and offers the connections that might be not so obvious but insightful.
Switching the views
View the notes in different ways, including the graph view, where you can see connections between the records.
Process
Problem
The amount of knowledge is growing, the volume of our attention is not.
Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of "Attention Span", began researching how people use computers in 2004. At that time, the average duration individuals spent focused on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded. That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.
To keep up with the increasing life tempo and information overload, people are coming up with a lot of solutions.
Those who don’t develop a habit to host their thought process in a digital solution, but are obsessed with making notes, contain them on paper, sticky notes, paper towels, notebooks, note apps, note taking apps. Some use Tiago Forte’s methods, some create their zettelcastens, or just have a small notebook in a pocket. Sometimes it's getting quite messy anyway, doesn’t it?
What tool could at the same time support our complex and curious minds and be friendly and intuitive?
Discover
Conducting surveys and interviews, I asked participants about their reading and thinking habits, how they deal with information they receive and the problems they face doing it.
After surveys, I conducted 5 interviews with people with quite intricate reading and information processing habits. The interviews where semi-structured and contained a set of questions and a guide: we often switched to other topics and then got back to the subject.
Interviews where recorded and I was making notes.
Interview note example
After conducting the research, I’ve determined 3 groups of users:
The Curious (power user)
Has a reading addiction
Wants to formulate an opinion
Answers the questions
Has no specific goal
The Writer
Prone to ADHD
Uses a lot of sources simultaneously
Creative, not always systematic
The Researcher
Thorough
Requires a solid system of sources
Operates hundreds of files: books, pictures, links, maps
Digital note-writing systems fixate on the presentation and manipulation of individual notes, mostly ignoring inter-note sense-making. *
Source: Andy Matuschak blog
All three groups have something in common. To keep track of their findings and research writing, they have either to keep everything in their head (and they fail) or build their own logic and rituals of processing and transferring knowledge to their databases. One of the participants told me they sit at the computer every second Saturday and start systemitizing and copy-pasting their notes wrom all the sources into their own graph database. It is an interesting and relaxing ritual, but sometimes filling in and connecting the dots can be owerwhelming.
Define
The customer interviews showed several groups of problems they are struggling with:
Issues with recalling
“Where did I read it?“
“What have I read a month ago?”
No connectivity
“How can this idea be connected to all the others?”
Hard planning and curating
“What should I read next?
“How will I find this reference?”
Fear of a clean slate
“What if I can’t predict the structure of my knowledge base from scratch?”
How might we solve these problems?
Assisted structuring
Automated tagging and structuring suggestions.
Assisted linking
“How can this idea be connected to all the others?”
Fast referencing
Create linked records right away.
Easy input
Initially flat structure. No need to bother about folders and hierarchies.
Develop
As the only member of the team I had to use my subtle technical abilities to create a prototype. Fortunately, design thinking is not something I have to be taught of.
Story map
Exploration and prototyping
Working on the prototype design, I started with determining initial functionality using story mapping technique. This helped me define what exactly I need to prorotype to demonstrate main user tasks, and notice details I could have missed between onboarding and main flow.
After that I mapped the initial information architecture of the solution and transferred it into hand-drawn mockups, and then lo-fi designs. By doing this I defined main entrance points, screens and main interaction patterns between them.
Main context of use for the solution – walking, standing, reading, walking the dog, sitting in a caffee while listening to podcast or reading a book/article/whatever. Knowing this, I defined starting point for the form: a mobile app.
Design searches: information architecture vs. user flow
Low fidelity prototype
After that I developed a first iteration of the prototype to present on the pitching session:
Prototype screenshot for the first presentation
Deliver
Time to pitch! The finale of the sandbox was public presentation and pitching, demonstrating the whole work: target auditory research, market research, business model and a prototype.
Screenshot from the prototype presentation
“I believe I missed this application while doing my doctoral degree. Great idea!”
Max Sandu, Head of jury
The project was featured on ISsoft website publication (in Russian).
Iterate
Some months later I decided to revisit the design to be more up-to-date and development-ready (just in case).
· Revisited fonts and visual appearance.
· Changed logo.
· Onboarding flow condenced to 3 screens, counting on guidance during first usage.
· Removed step with creating a space for notes as an excessive entity for the first use.
Let's focus on the app:
Reflect
Software is secondary. Intention and belief is first.
Software cannot change your life, it is only one of the tools you use to change your monkey mind.
I was not alone.
I received a lot of support and positive feedback from coworkers, mentors and jury. I didn't believe in this project even after the pitch until I've met friends who believed that it can work.
What's next?
I’m continuing my research how people work with their collections and knowledge bases, and currently trying to choose between developing such a solution or studying this topic from a more anthropological perspective.
By the way, if you find my idea interesting and want to share your feedback or join the project, don't hesitate to say Hi!