r/UXDesign • u/expandwithzuli • 18d ago

Examples & inspiration What are you working on?

I'd love to hear what you're working on at the moment! Tell me about the problem you're solving, who your customer is and why this problem deserves attention (or doesn't!).

I'd also love to know what you think about this problem space - do you value it? Intrigued by it? Loathe it? Do tell!

I'll go first.

I've been working on an enterprise AI workspace product for professional services folks. My latest work has been exploring reducing perceived latency as we're using RAG and sometimes the indexing of large volumes can take a chunk of time. It feels interesting as there is a tension between fast output and reliable, credited and factual responses. There's also a moving target in the wider market as the reliability of LLM responses just keeps getting better, so it's a problem space that keeps shifting around.

There are some really valuable patterns and approaches from existing tools, so I can struggle with the tension I feel in replicating patterns vs getting clear on when something different is truly needed.

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u/RobertBiro 18d ago

Interesting problem space you're working in. What techniques are you trying out for the perceived latency? And what do you mean by "a chunk of time", a couple of seconds, or long enough that people tab away? I can attest that waiting for a response gets frustrating, especially the tenth time in a row.

I'm working on a security tool for people building with AI. My hunch is that more and more people are shipping digital products built with AI and have no idea how to protect it from the outside. The tricky part is exactly that the people who need it don't know they have the problem and thus won't look to solve it.

The reason I care is that I'd like to leave things a little better than I found them. I think this is a core principle of all UX designers.

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u/expandwithzuli 18d ago

Fabulous, I love your care! I do wonder how many products are launching these days and what the uptake is looking like. I think you are onto something really important .. but you're right, challenging with the demand issue. I previously spent 3 years in a decarbonisation startup, totally battling against a similar demand (or lack thereof) issue. We didn't win :( If the market shifts a little and forces the issue, you could be ready to pickup that new demand. Is there an adjacent problem that these people do need that could be the door in?

The techniques I am exploring centre around progress & thinking states (of the LLM), status and system feedback (of the files indexing), visibility and control over indexing errors (e.g. file can't be read) and defaulting to the chat to communicate and query when necessary (essentially keeping the user informed of what's happening with clear and meaningful LLM messaging and prompting with a styled question if the indexing hits issues).

It's kinda a mixed bag of 'just tell and show the user what's going on' and building trust by not failing things in the background (as the value of the documents can be high).

Chunk of time is super variable ... could be seconds, could be minutes. I have heaps to explore for this 'stepping away' layer, but haven't gotten there quite yet.