AI null states at You.com

User problem:

The AI space is new for many users and has many limitations. It’s difficult for them to understand how it can be used to provide immediate value to them.

Solution:

From various user testing I did, I found that 2 patterns that were guiding users to submit more prompts to the AI but even more, they understood better the value it could give them. The concept below is a null state design that users would see their first time landing on the chat page.

  • Users could gain various ideas for how they could use the AI.
  • Concepts would be reinforced with imagery where appropriate.
  • Suggestions would update regularly to be more personalized.
  • This concept also supported our monetization efforts by explaining various AI modes and how they could be used.

Improve You.com modes usability

Problem:

At you.com we created some unique modes that can crawl the internet in real-time and do complex computational tasks. These have come with a few problems though.

  • Sometimes these modes can get stuck midway through a process which confuses users.
  • During the mode processing, users were seeing full RAW AI breakdown processes which are often confusing or not helpful.
  • The AI processing feels like it takes a long time.

Solution:

I designed various templates to represent different types of processing steps and AI was taking and made them much more user friendly. Each step would still show some real data that was being processed without forcing the user to see everything in a large confusing list. There is a certain portion of our audience that did still want to see the full breakdown so I moved that into a modal that could be triggered at any time, but the rest of the process would feel much faster and more interesting to a wider audience.