Summary
Noam by Peruse.io uses natural language processing to provide answers to inquiries within business documents. This service currently intercepts incoming questions, extracts potential answers, and delivers them to the user in a web-based platform. For three weeks, my team members (Dylan and Anna) and I worked on transforming Noam into desktop software. My primary roles were Project Manager and Content Strategist, but I also created user personas and a user journey, conducted user interviews, created the lo fidelity design, designed question & answer flows, and created the client presentation.
Noam by Peruse.io
UX Design | Project Management | Content Strategist
May 2018
The Challenge
For the Business
Provide examples of who can use Noam and how Noam can assist businesses by redesigning the Q&A interface, by showing how Noam answers questions correctly, incorrectly and with multiple answers.
For the Users
Hours of every workweek are wasted searching for files and information. People need a way to locate important information within their documents, but they don’t always know where their documents live.
The Solution
Design Desktop Software
That allows users to search for files across multiple cloud services and ask questions, directly from your desktop
Create Browser Extensions
That allow users to search for files across cloud services and ask questions.
Improve Existing Website
By redesigning the UI and creating a way for users to search within their files on their local drives.
Solution: Designing Desktop Software
From all of the data we collected, we discovered that what would work best for Noam as a business and its users it should be turned into desktop software. So we decided to primarily focus on this solution for the deliverable.
The Process
What we did
Affinity Mapping
Business Canvas Model
User Research
Usability Testing
iOS Standards Research
Market Research
User Journey
What tools we used
Pen & Paper
Sketch
Invision
Adobe Photoshop
Noam
Google Surveys
What we delivered
Competitive Analysis
Research-Driven Personas
Interactive Prototype
Use Cases
Sitemap
Pricing Plan
Wireframes
Annotated Screens
Understanding Noam Better
This is the current user interface design for Noam by Peruse.io when users login. Users have to upload a document to ask Noam questions. Noam then searches within the document to provide answers. Noam does not search for files (the users have to find the documents they want to upload first) and Noam can only read text files or pdfs that have OCR (Optical character Recognition) on.
This is the current user interface design for Noam when a document has been uploaded and a question has been asked. For our initial round of user interviews, we were asking users what kind of information they were looking for in their files, but we quickly discovered that users struggled to find their documents, they can't even think about what they need to find inside of the document
Better Understanding Search
Once we learned that users struggled so much with finding their documents, we realized we had to ask more people about this struggle. So we sent out a Google survey and had 17 responses. Two of the biggest takeaways came from these questions:
How hard is it to find their documents
Where are their documents
How is your business storing their documents?
Do people find it easy to search for files on their computer
Asking the Users & Analyzing the Data
After receiving the Google Survey results and Interviewing 12 people, we compiled the data and synthesized it. The biggest takeaways were:
Users struggle to find their files on their computer
Users have documents in multiple places and it is hard to find where they live
Users don’t want to download a file and upload it to Noam
Users aren’t sure if they trust Artificial Intelligence to provide the right answer
Users need the ability to preview documents that contain the generated answer
Looking at the Competitors
We looked at other Natural Language Processing systems and search systems to see where Noam could fit in the landscape. We know users struggle to find their files before they even are able to search within a document for the answers they seek. After seeing the the competitors, we discovered that Noam could not only help give answers about your files, but solves the issue of finding a document by allowing for cross cloud search.
Who are New Potential Noam Users?
Law
Search within a 1000+ page document
Human Resources
Assess whether or not someone is hirable
Architecture
Quickly reference information about building codes
Education
Benefits both professors and students
Design
Locate different file types in shared folders
Marketing
Find files across multiple clouds
Medical
Find dosage information, look up admission dates for patients
Meet the Users
After all of our interviews and research, we chose the three industries that the research showed would benefit most from Noam.
Avery Rivers: A paralegal working in a San Francisco injury attorney's office
Johnny James: A Human Resources Specialist working at a startup in New York City that is quickly growing
Pablo Diaz: An architect who owns his own architecture firm in Los Angeles, CA
Avery deals with 100 + page documents daily ranging from medical records to insurance claims. She thinks Noam could really help her speed up her work flow, especially if Noam provided the source document answers were being pulled on so she could click in to reference it. Like this:
How Avery Uses Noam
Johnny, a human resources specialist would use Noam. Johnny is the head of HR at a small startup that is rapidly growing and they are currently hiring more than he can handle. It’s taking away from assisting new employees with their on-boarding questions. But when a new hire stops by his office to complain about how long and difficult to understand the benefits guide is, Johnny can just ask Noam about a specific plan and Noam tells him $128 weekly.
How Johnny Uses Noam
Pablo deals with multiple file types from pdfs to rendering, so Pablo needs Noam to find files and search within, like when Pablo needs to quickly reference California building code to make sure his designs are ada friendly. He uses noam to check the measurements of an elevator lobby in order to determine whether or not it is accessible
How Pablo Uses Noam
Redesigning Noam: Lo - Fi
Takeaways
Users weren’t sure why there what the “i” button did
Users didn’t like clicking the ‘i” button, they expected to be able to click the file image to go straight to their file
Wanted a traditional breadcrumbs feel to see where their file was located
Users were not be able to toggle from a specific result page to the more results page- a back button was missing
Redesigning Noam: Mid - Fi
Takeaways
Users felt there was too much white space below the search bar
Users did not think they could type a new search question because the previous question was still in the search bar
Toggles would not actually exist because it would be an information drop and re-upload every time a user turned them on and off for the business
How do users authorize? How would that look?
Redesigning Noam: The Prototype
