Interactive Research Reports
Custom, interactive regulatory reports with a built-in expert copilot.
Project summary
Note: Project details are limited due to confidentiality restrictions.
Goal: Help researchers understand all relevant regulations for their projects in a highly-regulated industry.
Solution: A customized regulatory report builder with a built-in AI chatbot that helps users understand the report.
Status: Prototyped
My role: Product design, product strategy
Helping users in a highly-regulated industry
Note: Because this project is confidential, I can’t go into detail about the product or industry involved this project. With this in mind, I’ve removed certain meaningful text and graphics from the writeup and mockups.
I helped a startup design the first version of their AI-assisted research tool that helps users research industry-specific regulations. Specifically, this product gathers information from various legal and regulatory sources and presents them in an intuitive and interactive report.
The current process for generating these reports involves lots of manual work, takes several weeks, and costs thousands of dollars. This product aims to save customers time and money by generating these detailed reports more quickly and affordably than the current process.
Generating customized reports
The user starts by searching for an address or selecting a past search. The report is then generated in the chatbot window, which lets users ask follow-up questions.
In the bottom right, users can see a visualization as part of the report. They can also toggle between various options for the style of this visualization.
A living document
This product helps users understand all regulations relevant to the user’s project. As the user enters a search query and then continues to interact with the AI, the AI generates a custom report that the user can continue to refine and customize with repeated prompting. This was inspired by the “living document” UX pattern for AI-centric products.
This lets users not only see all essential regulatory information in one place, but interact with it in order to understand it better. Rather than having a chatbot conversation next to an AI-generated report side-by-side, they are integrated into the same experience. This lets users click on any piece of information in the report to get an explanation or ask follow-up questions. There’s no need to copy and paste information into the search field.
By letting users get in-context explanations of anything in the report, this product is designed to be accessible for novice and experienced users alike.
Previous design iterations
The first version of the design featured a report with the chatbot “floating” on top. The intent was to simply lay out the different parts of the report and give users access to a chatbot if they had questions about the report. In this version, while the backend would still have depended on AI to gather the right results, the user experience would not have been particularly AI-centric. Instead, this version prioritized the report, while the chatbot was secondary.
For the second version, the goals were to establish a clearer visual hierarchy, integrate the chatbot more fully into the user experience, and let users share search results. With those goals in mind, this version included the following changes from the first version:
Added a search bar at the top of the screen
In the report, made the top and left modules feel more attached to the visualization. This is because those modules show information that pertains to what is in the visual.
Put the chatbot in a collapsible side drawer on the right side. The intent was to make the chatbot feel more like part of the report, while still letting users hide it as needed.
Added a “Share” button in the top right
In moving from Iteration 2 to the latest iteration shown above, the goals were to fully integrate the chatbot into the report, and also to improve the layout of information in the report.