Perplexity

Perplexity challenged our design team to explore how the product could improve engagement in the college segment, where students often rely on other AI tools for research and writing. During my internship as a UX Designer at CIF Innovators Lab, I designed Snippet, a new feature that lets students highlight and save text directly into Perplexity Spaces, transforming the platform into a growing personal knowledge base instead of a one-time search tool.

Summer 2026 - 10 weeks

Client

Perplexity via CIF

Client

Perplexity via CIF

Role

UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer

Role

UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer

Team

2 PMs, 3 Designers, 2 Marketers

Team

2 PMs, 3 Designers, 2 Marketers

Context

Context

Although Perplexity had already grown to more than 15 million users, our research showed that awareness and engagement among college students remained low. Through surveys, interviews, and competitive analysis, we found that students constantly switched between AI tools, documents, and note-taking apps to collect information. Existing workflows relied heavily on copy-and-paste, making research fragmented and difficult to organize. These insights reframed the challenge from simply increasing engagement to helping students capture and retain knowledge within a single workflow.

Although Perplexity had already grown to more than 15 million users, our research showed that awareness and engagement among college students remained low. Through surveys, interviews, and competitive analysis, we found that students constantly switched between AI tools, documents, and note-taking apps to collect information. Existing workflows relied heavily on copy-and-paste, making research fragmented and difficult to organize. These insights reframed the challenge from simply increasing engagement to helping students capture and retain knowledge within a single workflow.

Solution

Solution

I led the design exploration around improving research workflows by focusing on reducing context switching. After exploring inline annotations, user testing revealed that students valued saving reusable quotes more than annotating content. I pivoted the concept into Snippet, a lightweight feature built on top of Perplexity Spaces that allows users to instantly save highlighted text into organized folders for future research, essay writing, and study. Through iterative usability testing, I refined interactions, navigation, and information architecture, resulting in a solution that achieved a 92% task success rate, reduced quote-saving time by 65%, and received a 90% overall satisfaction score during testing.

Link to Case Study Presentation

I led the design exploration around improving research workflows by focusing on reducing context switching. After exploring inline annotations, user testing revealed that students valued saving reusable quotes more than annotating content. I pivoted the concept into Snippet, a lightweight feature built on top of Perplexity Spaces that allows users to instantly save highlighted text into organized folders for future research, essay writing, and study. Through iterative usability testing, I refined interactions, navigation, and information architecture, resulting in a solution that achieved a 92% task success rate, reduced quote-saving time by 65%, and received a 90% overall satisfaction score during testing.

Link to Case Study Presentation

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