Digging deeper on every idea with Narratives
A concept tool that helps turn raw ideas into developed projects. It uses intelligent agents to add context, suggest questions, and connect related thoughts over time. Designed around quick, conversational note-taking, Narratives encourages reflection and helps ideas grow instead of getting lost
Context
Not to brag, but great ideas pop up in my head every day. But I rarely turn them into something real. Often items, I struggle at adding context to the initial idea. Naturally, great ideas end up in the trash.
We add context by reflecting on other stuff that’s in our heads. Being one-on-one with that stuff is intimidating and holds us back from getting our projects done.
What if there was something to nudge us to think more? I set out to design this middleman that could help turn abstract ideas into meaningful projects.
Problems that I worked with:
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Ideas get lost or forgotten before they’re developed
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Hard to see connections between ideas over time
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Hard to ask yourself the right (if any) questions that add more ideas
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Feedback is limited to either yourself or others who barely know anything about your project
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Lack of references that could help with new ideas
Process
I took familiar notes and implemented context and general agents into them. The context one analyses the note and suggests a question for you to write on, and on, and on. There’s always a link to the previous note to track how this idea has been evolving.
The general agent analyses the whole project text corpus. It makes a project summary that can identify which stage it’s on based on how many ideas you have and how much you dwelled on them. It also extracts key topics that you mostly write about and suggests 5 questions for each of them. Another starting point for ideas. To make sure you’re not working in a vacuum and to learn how others made projects with similar ideas, the general agent provides references.
A new note starts like a message, since it’s a familiar way for writing short notes. If the note’s just 4 lines long, it opens in full screen. Very fluid.
To promote short notes rather than whole longreads, the only tool for formatting is lists. To make things even simpler, there’s voice input.
Learnings
I’ve created dozens of pet projects, and they all originated from what I thought other people needed. They were also a way to test my visual skills. I’m very much a text guy, and challenging myself to something visual was fun, but nothing much at the end. It’s only now when I’m building a tool that I need myself that embraces text as its nature, I feel like I might be onto something real. Building for myself, not just others, helped me focus on depth rather than surface polish.