Glean
Enterprise AI platform
I lead the redesign of Glean's composer — the front door to the assistant feature.
Problem + Context
Glean's composer left room for opportunity
An illustrative breakdown of Glean's composer in its current state, surfacing the inconsistencies and shortcomings of the existing system.
Problem
Glean's current composer (is):
- Inconsistent: Actions, create docs or images, and create skills, all follow different patterns.
- Doesn't showcase Glean's affordances: The composer only shows a small subset of the features and tools of the Assistant.
- Not scalable: As we build more functionality into assistant (e.g., creating agents) we need a principled approach to scale.
Context
As building with Assistant becomes more common, it is important that we intentionally design the composer to support creating artifacts and using system capabilities such as skills and agents directly within the composer. And as Glean's feature set grows, we need a composer-system that can scale with future capabilities rather than layering on one-off patterns.
This work proposes improvements to better surface the capabilities of Glean within the composer, nudging users to use more of Glean to tackle their work.
Exploration, Ideation, and Insights
A principled and craftful redesign
Design Principles
- Simplicity & consistency: Unifying the creation experience for all things.
- In line creation & referencing UI: Affordances for creating or referencing appear in line.
- Mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive: All affordances of the composer can be enabled via / or @ shortcuts. Each shortcut menu has discrete functions.
Early Explorations
I began by designing the shortcut menus and their interaction model, as shortcuts encourage us to consider all of the potential affordances we might support the user in taking via the composer.
Two different shortcut models: #1 "/" to create any artifact via Glean's assistant, "@" to invoke an agent or a skill or add any context, #2 "/" to create an artifact or invoke an agent or skill, "@" to add any context
Findings
- Users preferred exploration #2, since they already invoke skills with "/" and see agents as related to skills, so they expected both to live in the same place.
- Users struggled to understand the difference between agents and skills
- While "Interactive" artifact adoption is high, users find the artifact name unclear
Results
Clear affordances, a delightful UX, and designed to scale
Addressing inconsistency
All actions and reference context now sit directly in line, with a redesigned set of UI chips to differentiate composer affordances from plain text.
Create agent that gives me a morning briefing each day at 9AM.
Surfacing Glean's affordances
A considerable part of this work centered on identifying which of Glean's many capabilities should be accessible via the composer, and therefore executable through the assistant harness. Once identified, we determined how these affordances should surface across the +, /, and @ menus, creating heuristics for where each affordance type belongs and ordering items using empirical product data.
Designing a scalable system
We designed a scalable system to organize and surface the many affordances of Glean's assistant within the composer, the feature's front door. As more affordances are added, we're confident they'll fit the model we've proposed: each one is either something to "Use" or "Create" (/), or something to "Tag" (@).
