Making it easier to manage, search, and resume chats in ChatGPT

Role

Duration

Team

Mentor

UX Researcher
UI Designer

4 Weeks

2 UX / UI Designers

Marzie Nadali

What Is the Problem?

ChatGPT users often struggle to manage and revisit multiple conversations, especially when using the tool for ongoing tasks or long-term projects.

AI tools like ChatGPT have become deeply integrated into our daily routines, from quick recipe ideas and workout tips to complex research help, writing support, and coding assistance. As users rely more heavily on AI to assist with a wide range of tasks, the conversations they have with these tools become more valuable, and more numerous. However, users still have some problems:

Understanding Users’ Core Needs

ChatGPT Is Great For Thinking, but Poor for Tracking: The Organizational Limits of ChatGPT

To understand the frustrations users experience with ChatGPT, we began by analyzing comments from the OpenAI Community forums, Reddit, and other online platforms.

Interview

To better understand user behavior and pain points, we interviewed with 7 ChatGPT users over Zoom.We asked participants to share their screens. This allowed us to see firsthand how they navigate the platform, manage multiple conversations, and attempt to find or resume past chats.

From the Interviews, We Uncovered Several Insights:

What Users Say:

Identifying Users Types

We categorized users into two key profiles based on their needs and motivations :

📌 We identified project-based users as our core audience, given their need for structured, long-term, continuous interaction with ChatGPT.

⚡Project-based users who use ChatGPT for both simple and complex tasks, face a clear need for better structure and organization.

🟢 Let’s Pause for a Moment and See How Users Organize Their Digital Files in Practice:

Competitive Analysis

All AI Chatbots Recognize the Importance of History, but How Do They Handle It?

We analyzed leading AI tools in the market such as Gemini, Claude, Grok and ChatGPT to explore how they support users in organizing their chat histories.

🔴 Despite these features in ChatGPT, many users are unaware of them or do not use them effectively.

💡AI chats are evolving, and as the leader, ChatGPT needs to lead the way. Yet key user challenges remain.

Storyboard

A Day in the Life of a ChatGPT User

Ideation

Now It’s Time to Think in Solutions !

In the ideation phase, we built on the insights gathered from our user research to brainstorm targeted solutions. To stay focused on what matters most, we used an Impact-Effort Matrix to prioritize ideas that were both doable and meaningful aiming for improvements that would help users and make their experience better.

Track Activity and Stay Organized:

To improve navigation and productivity, a dashboard was introduced, allowing users to monitor their activity, organize projects, and quickly resume important conversations.

One Project, One Workspace :

To eliminate the need to switch between multiple apps, a dedicated Project Overview was introduced, centralizing notes, saved chats, and uploaded files within ChatGPT.

Continue Where You Left Off

As users start a new prompt, they receive relevant conversation suggestions based on their prompt, making it easier to continue existing discussions and avoid duplicate conversations.

Quick Save and Stay Organized

To support better organization, a “Save” option was introduced, enabling users to store key chats in folders for easy future access.

New Design, Refine Responses in Context 🤩

We improved an “Edit in canvas” option at the end of each response to give users the flexibility to annotate or revise responses directly. When clicked, a side panel appears on the right, allowing users to edit the content in context. This feature supports critical thinking, personalization, and better knowledge retention by letting users tailor responses to their needs.

Old Design 😕

In the previous design, there was an “Edit in Canvas” option that allowed the user to edit the ChatGPT response by clicking on it, but the edit options were very limited and confusing.

User Testing
Let’s See What Worked Well and What Users Liked!