I’m genuinely excited about using ChatGPT in my professional and personal life. While the platform is continuously evolving, I see great opportunities to contribute ideas that could make it even more impactful. I created this post using Canvas and encountered many of these pain points during this same chat. Below is a concise list of suggestions, organized by feature areas, to address current challenges and propose solutions to enhance the user experience.
Voice and Chat Section:
- Minimizing the Chat Window in Voice Mode
- Pain: Users in voice mode cannot view the text of the conversation without opening a new tab, disrupting workflow and making it harder to reference or reuse content, especially for developers working with IDEs.
- UX Solution: Allow users to minimize the voice chat window while retaining visibility of the conversation text. This feature should seamlessly integrate with the workspace, enabling users to copy and paste content directly into IDEs without additional clicks or windows.
- Value: critical for the UX
- Implementation Effort: Easy to Implement
- Idle Time Indicator and tollerance configuration for Voice Chats
- Pain: Users are uncertain when their input is expected or if a pause in speech is recognized as the end of their turn, leading to awkward interruptions or delays.
- UX Solution: Implement a visual indicator, such as a bar filling up during idle moments, to signal when the system is ready to accept further input. Include customizable pause durations to accommodate varying speaking styles.
- Value: Important
- Implementation Effort: Moderate to Implement
- Switching Between Chats and Maintaining Context
- Pain: Users find it challenging to maintain context when switching between chats, especially when referencing or collecting content from previous discussions for ongoing tasks. For example, while solving a problem in one chat, users might want to revisit or extract content from a previous discussion to recontextualize their current work.
- UX Solution: Voice chat could integrate access to a searchable list of previous chats, allowing users to either switch to another chat or retrieve relevant content without leaving the current session. This would provide a fluid and productive workflow for recontextualizing ongoing discussions.
- Value: Epic (This would multiply the value of a conversation with ChatGPT.)
- Implementation Effort: Hard to Implement
- Interrupting Long Responses
- Pain: When ChatGPT’s voice chat gives a very long response, users cannot interrupt it, which can be frustrating and requires them to close and reopen the chat to regain control.
- UX Solution: Add a “stop” button during voice output to allow users to pause or terminate lengthy responses. This would provide better control over the conversation flow and improve usability.
- Value: Very Important
- Implementation Effort: Easy to ImplementThe voice chat feature is incredibly impressive and holds immense potential. Once fully integrated with ChatGPT’s UX, it could unlock numerous opportunities. By prioritizing improvements here, users could leverage voice chat in the background, enabling them to create and interact without needing to visually focus on ChatGPT. This is especially important given the lack of robust integrations in IDEs, as seen with tools like Copilot.
Canvas Section:
- Listing and Searching Canvas Documents
- Pain: Users lack a clear way to view and organize all Canvas documents generated within a chat, making it difficult to locate and revisit important content.
- UX Solution: Introduce a list of generated Canvas documents within the interface, possibly in a bottom bar. Include a search feature to quickly find specific documents based on keywords or titles.
- Value: Very Important
- Implementation Effort: Easy to Implement
- Improving UX for Long Document/Code Editing
- Pain: Editing long documents often requires repetitive iterations, as the system may not fully understand the context or scope of requested changes. Additionally, users may want the ability to adjust the level of detail or length of specific sections dynamically. A lot of errors during my path to write
- UX Solution: Enhance the editing experience by providing an intuitive contextual update mode where users can highlight sections for targeted updates. A slider bar could be integrated to dynamically adjust the level of detail for highlighted text, enabling users to expand or condense content with precision. This approach ensures users have greater control, whether they need a concise summary or an expanded explanation, providing flexibility tailored to their specific needs.
- Value: Important
- Implementation Effort: Moderate to Implement
General Chat UX Section:
- Customizing Suggested Commands (New Chat)
- Pain: The predefined list of suggested commands at the start of a chat may not align with the user’s most frequent needs, leading to inefficiency.
- UX Solution: Allow users to customize their list of suggested commands to ensure quick access to frequently used features and tools, tailoring the experience to individual workflows.
- Value: Very Important
- Implementation Effort: Easy to Implement
- Organizing Chats into Folders
- Pain: Managing multiple chats becomes cumbersome without a clear organization system, making it hard to keep track of related or ongoing discussions.
- UX Solution: Implement a folder system in the sidebar, similar to Gmail. Users could drag and drop chats into designated folders for better organization and quick retrieval.
- Value: Important
- Implementation Effort: Moderate to Implement
- Profile Switching When Starting a New Chat
- Pain: Users with specific expertise or roles (e.g., developer, carpenter, CTO) often require tailored interactions, but the system currently lacks personalization options.
- UX Solution: Introduce role-based profiles where users can specify their expertise. This feature could include a dropdown menu to easily select a profile, each accompanied by a relevant image and a descriptive prompt. Example profiles could include hobbies like ‘Gardening (hobby),’ professional roles such as ‘Developer (work),’ or wellness categories like ‘Meditation (well-being).’ Suggested commands (new chat) could also be driven by the role selected in the dropdown.
- Value: Nice to Have
- Implementation Effort: Moderate to Implement
Closing Note:
I understand the challenges and complexity involved in building such a robust and versatile platform. The features and functionalities already present are a testament to the team’s dedication and expertise. The suggestions outlined above are meant to further enhance an already remarkable tool, ensuring it continues to empower users in their diverse and evolving workflows. Excellent work so far, and we look forward to seeing how ChatGPT evolves!