I am currently helping build Skeema, working on augmenting human cognition with intelligence, starting with helping users solve their tab overload problem.
Incubated at CMU in the Knowledge Accelerator lab under Professor Niki Kittur, I joined a small team of 5 where I lead the design of multiple key features to help users be more productive on the web. I helped navigate the product from concepts to a Product Hunt launch (4.9 rating), venture funding and now an AI-powered tool to augment human productivity.
I designed the MVP based on qualitative research and user analytics, developed and tested prototypes, and collaborated with engineering for implementation. I also built the marketing website, revamped the existing design and crafted the brand direction.
Link to the Skeema Website.
2 Engineers
2 Designers
1 Product Manager
Browser tools
Web tools
Productivity
Knowledge Management
Zero to One
Sep 2022 - Present
Tab overload, a common state of browsers today, arises from various habits and challenges. People fear losing information, leading to an accumulation of open tabs. Multitasking, the need for reference, deferred tasks, and the low cost of opening a new tab contribute to the pile-up. Additionally, browser tools often lack effective ways to manage this deluge. The browser, intended to aid productivity, ironically hinders it.
Skeema's mission is to harness computation to acclerate cognition, starting with the browser. When I joined, Skeema's main product was a browser extension to help users declutter their browsers by saving tabs to projects and marking them as tasks, adding notes and more. It started as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University's Knowledge Accelerator Lab, headed by Professor Aniket Kittur.
Being super interested in productivity, I was immediately drawn to Skeema's problem and mission, leading to my joining the small team.
The process, though non-linear, can be broken down into 2 broad phases: figuring out the problem to solve and then solving it. This is a oversimplicfication and each phase had its own multiple divergence & convergences.
My first 6 months with Skeema were spent creating concepts & prototypes for divergent directions to test with users to validate ideas before we wrote a single line of code.
With a small team, testing these concepts with users helped us understand what problems were worth solving.
Here are 3 concepts:
The goal was to generate network effects by turning Skeema's project pages into flexible, visual canvases or personal dashboards. Imagine sharing visual boards for a trip to France or your favourite books of 2023.
The Idea
The goal was to improve the link sharing features in Skeema and support collaborative decision making. Users could easily share projects with friends or colleagues by generating public or private links for them to comment on.
To access the app, users would have to open a new tab page. The sidebar allows users to access their Skeema projects on any page and save their open tabs.
Concept tests guiding us toward defining the problem and our target user archetype: the serial context switcher. Context-switching knowledge workers, often juggle multiple projects simultaneously, navigating multiple open windows.
Examples: A consultant managing multiple projects or a product manager juggling multiple tasks/ workstreams.
Each open tab represents a task, be it an article, tax-related work, or a PRD to review. Users often keep tabs open for weeks or even months, fearing they'll lose track of the To-Do if they close them.
Windows and tabs can represent external user mental models, users organize their tasks by windows. Switching contexts by switching windows is common behavior.
While there's an abundance of work apps out there, the challenge lies in seamlessly transitioning between them within browsers. This is described in the model created above by Prof. Niki Kittur.
The problem above can be further broken down into 3 parts:
How might we help users suspend tasks and close their tabs without the fear of losing information?
How might we help users refind and resume their tasks and their associated tabs with ease?
How might we provide intelligent suggestions to open and close tabs?
The sidebar evolved over months of iteration and understanding evolving user needs and jobs to be done. Here are some selected explorations of challenges I worked through.
Not all browser tabs are equal. We created 3 spaces within the sidebar. Let’s unpack the different types of tabs users have open.
Every tab has an intent, a task a user plans to get to now or later. A user keeps tabs open as a visual reminder of these tasks. We created three spaces within the Sidebar.
Users can treat their open tabs as active tasks and plan for future ones, much like a to-do list.
Users focus only on their current contexts.
Not all browser tabs are equal. We created 3 spaces within the sidebar. Let’s unpack the different types of tabs users have open.
A primary benefit of the sidebar is the ability to perform actions on multiple tabs without changing the web-page or opening Skeema in a new page.
"To save multiple pages, I need to always open a new Skeema tab to save multiple tabs as a batch."
To judge the tradeoffs of the various directions shown above, it was very important to know how it feels.
I made full use of the variant prototyping features in Figma and Prototopie to create realistic prototypes.
Another challenge was fitting actions into a compact tab area. I addressed this by prioritizing actions, with primary actions shown as buttons and secondary actions tucked away behind an action menu.
This is where some of the challenges of being a Chrome extension and not a native browser feature show up. The single biggest risk for this feature is people just not discovering it.
Since the sidebar would take up precious viewport estate, If we made it too intrusive and present on every page, users would find it obstructive. We approached this challenge in multiple ways, weighing the tradeoffs of ease of access vs level of obstruction.
We built this prototype in code to test it since it seemed like a promising direction.
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Waiting for the day I get to execute a pie menu in a product.
The second part of the challenge was helping users get back into their suspended contexts.
Users can easily view their previous tasks sorted chronologically and relaunch their tabs, groups or windows saved to Later.
I designed empty states to explain the concept to new users with crisp copy conveying the feature benefits.
I explored redesigns of the Skeema homepage to support the easy re-entry into tasks saved for later with visual bundles of your browser tabs
Save tabs, groups or entire windows to projects with a single click. Smart project suggestions on hover.
Effortlessly suspend and resume your tasks without having a gazillion tabs open. With the 'Later' space, Skeema ensures users can efficiently store and retrieve tabs, sparing both their RAM and memory.
A new homepage that supports easy re-entry into projects and tasks.
A spotlight fuzzy search that helps users easily find things they've saved or come across on the internet.
I refreshed the existing Skeema project page to support new functionality and better visual hierarchy. In the process, I created a scaleable component system.
Built over 2 days on Webflow.
This is only part of the story, for the feature length - hit me up.
