Rabbithole

Prototype link (Please submit a link to a playable prototype, not a link to your design file) Link
Describe your project (max 150 words) AI tools are powerful for generating ideas, but, like jumping to the end of a book, simply producing a list often skips the process of creativity. Rabbithole is designed to foster divergent thinking by guiding creatives through a web of related media across various mediums. By encouraging the exploration of unexpected connections, it helps users build mind maps that spark fresh, innovative ideas. Rather than just presenting solutions, Rabbithole invites users to engage deeply with a range of sources, emphasizing the ability of human creativity, and staying human in the age of AI.
Describe your research process and findings. If you conducted any surveys or interviews, please include the survey form and/or interview questions here. If you conducted secondary research by pulling from online sources, please include a link to your sources. (Max 500 words) Our research process involved conducting 20 user interviews, each lasting around 20 minutes and then conducting market analysis. We began by exploring users' habits with AI tools, focusing on how AI has influenced their workflows and their broader views on the human experience. Interestingly, creativity emerged as a central theme across almost all interviews. It was consistently highlighted as a key part of what makes us human. This insight led us to delve deeper into how people use AI in their creative processes. As we shifted our focus to understanding the creative process specifically, we uncovered two crucial insights: Creativity is a divergent thought process. Users often engage in extensive research, gathering diverse references and synthesizing them to form new ideas. Some of their most unique ideas arose almost serendipitously from seemingly unrelated or unexpected information. For example, one user described how, while researching drone designs, they stumbled upon an unexpected reference about the design of fan configurations. This led them to the innovative idea of using a different number of fans in an underwater drone, showcasing how ideas often come from exploration in places one wouldn't typically expect. AI tools streamline research and ideation but limit divergent thinking. Many users rely on AI tools like Perplexity or ChatGPT to quickly generate lists of resources or project ideas. While these tools speed up the process, they often present the information in a narrow, predefined manner, missing out on the breadth of exploration that fosters creativity. As a result, users are inadvertently cutting short the opportunity for divergent thinking—the part of the creative process that can yield some of the most unique, innovative ideas. These insights led us to a key question: How might we design a tool that aids creatives in their process while encouraging divergent thinking? To start, we conducted a competitive analysis of existing tools used by creatives and we noticed a major gap: they limit exploration to a single medium. Pinterest is primarily visual, Cosmos focuses on digital art, YouTube is dedicated to video, and Spotify is confined to music. Yet, true divergent thinking often requires the ability to explore multiple mediums in one space. For example, we interviewed a filmmaker who said she would go to Google Images, and then Google, and then YouTube to find pictures, videos, and articles to inform her screenwriting. This gap inspired our concept: a tool that encourages users to explore a variety of media (images, text, video, music, etc.) in one unified platform. By doing so, we aim to provide a richer, more dynamic experience for users to engage with, allowing them to think across multiple channels, make connections between disparate ideas, and ultimately generate more innovative solutions. Our goal is to create a space where users can take in diverse sources of inspiration and synthesize them into something truly new.
Describe your most important design decisions. What research findings and/or user testing results led you to make these decisions? (Max 500 words) How might we encourage exploration and divergent thinking? Our first approach was to look at natural human habits and everyday behaviors. The more familiar an experience is, the more intuitive and seamless it feels. One such habit is "falling down a rabbit hole”, a behavior common across all age groups, especially with the rise of social media. Inspired by this, we designed our core feature to emulate that experience: a mind map of related sources that enables users to continuously follow threads, diving deeper into their prompt.

However, the goal of our product is to foster an active, engaged creative process rather than promoting passive consumption of information. We didn’t want to create a platform where users mindlessly scroll through content like they do on social media sites, but rather a space that actively encourages users to reflect on the material they gather. One key design decision to support this was the addition of "related ideas." Instead of using traditional terms like "keywords" or “phrases," we chose "ideas" to encourage users to think critically about how the information they’re encountering could be applied, expanded, or transformed. To reinforce this concept, we made the text gray and added a blinking cursor, which nudges users to actively fill in the space with their thoughts.

Another significant design decision involved how sources are presented. Initially, we considered displaying sources in sets of three, populated on the main board, but we quickly realized this approach was both messy and limiting. It didn’t provide enough variety, which could stifle divergent thinking. Instead, we redesigned the layout to include a side popup with a much broader selection of media as well as a regeneration button to refresh the provided sources. This allowed users to choose from a wider range of sources and have control over which ones they add to their board. Importantly, even sources they don’t keep still contribute to the creative process, as users can reflect on them, discard them, or combine them with other ideas.

To be able to include sources from anywhere and of any kind, we designed the expand-source tool to function like a new tab opening on top of the platform, mitigating API issues. By adopting a quick-peek view similar to Arc, users can easily access external websites without us hosting them, while still being easily drawn back into the platform and being encouraged to explore more.