5 min read

Reflecting on 2023: The Evolution of Looppanel

Reflecting on 2023: The Evolution of Looppanel
“Simple can be harder than complex.”
- Steve Jobs

At Looppanel, we shipped a lot in 2023. Reading that Paul Graham essay 5 times had to pay off at some point, right? 🚀

The releases included:

  • AI notes
  • Interview question assignment for notes
  • Semantic search
  • Team workspace
  • Looppanel Chrome extension

… and a lot more. 

We're on our way to becoming SOC 2 and GDPR compliant. We became the number 1 product of the day and number 1 UX product of the week on ProductHunt a few months back too! 🎉

This post is a recap of the wholesome goodness built by our amazing team last year. Loudspeakers and all, here we go! 📢

AI notes

A big hit among our users, AI notes was one of our first big releases of the year.

Good ol' user love

You may be thinking: aren’t AI notes or summaries old news like dial-up internet? If yes, wait a second because the answer lies in the details. 

Summaries coughed up by large language models (LLMs) from a transcript can be hard to trust, read and parse. Our AI notes address each of these aspects.

AI notes and corresponding transcript

To be specific, each note:

  • can be traced back to precise transcript chunk that it gets generated from
  • uses context from adjacent conversation and not just the specific chunk they are generated for
  • is written in an easy-to-read objective language suited for user research
  • can be used to listen to relevant parts of recording or create a shareable video clip in 1-click

That’s not all though. These notes come categorized according to themes or interview questions that you use during interviews. More on that in the next section!

💡
We process data using custom-built algorithms and interact with an LLM (large language model) at multiple steps. Call it an AI pipeline, chain or if you’re feeling poetic, a dance involving good ol' traditional code and LLMs. 🕺💃

Automated interview question assignment for notes

You conducted multiple interviews. That’s great. How do you make sense of all the information across calls now?

Enter Looppanel’s automated interview question assignment!
AI notes automatically get assigned to the relevant interview question. In addition to individual call pages, notes categorized as per interview questions or themes from multiple calls can be viewed together on the analysis page.

Analysis view

Pretty cool, right? 🤯

💡
Under the hood, we use vector embeddings along with an LLM-based pipeline to make the categorization happen.

Ever experienced the pain of finding relevant information in hundreds or thousands of pages of transcripts? I can empathize if you have, but fortunately, Looppanel users tasked with such a challenge won't have to anymore.

We released semantic search a few weeks back to help users find the data they are looking for in seconds. You can query using natural language and ask questions of your data.

Smart search

Being able to find relevant information from a repository of research data can often save time and dollars. However, traditional keyword search systems don't always lead to desired data points. Manually tagging and adding metadata to raw data can improve results but is too tedious as a process to persist with. That’s about to become old news now.

💡
Our search system is powered by a mixture of state-of-the-art vector search and traditional keyword search. In addition, an AI model customized to improve search result relevance adds the finishing touch.

We're iterating on this one as I write. Expect to see more improvements soon!

Workspaces

Work and user research is more fun when done with your team. This belief, along with repeated requests from users, led us to build team workspace in Looppanel.

Workspace settings in Looppanel

A team's projects now live in one place. Users can upload calls to projects, do analysis and create insights together. They can also view each other's work subject to relevant permissions. 🤝

Chrome extension

We launched a browser extension that cut out inefficiency and anxiety for our users. No, we didn't launch another productivity or meditation app (yet).

Looppanel Chrome extensio

Looppanel Chrome extension automatically opens a window before your user interview kicks off. It displays your discussion guide, provides a space to write notes and even resizes itself!

Brewnote

Our AI notes were so popular among Looppanel users that we launched them as a standalone tool: Brewnote. No signup required!

Shoutout to the entire product and marketing team for some kickass work by the entire team make to Brewnote the #1 product of the day and #1 UX product of the week.

Wrapping it up

The list can continue but this post will not. I need to squeeze in more mentions before wrapping things up. These include:

... and so on.

What's next?

Over the next couple of months, a big focus is to take analysis capabilities within Looppanel up by a notch. An AI-assisted analysis workflow is currently in beta. This will be in addition to related releases including visual improvements, and powerful filters for analysis view.

We are also on course to obtain a SOC 2 Type 2 certification and GDPR compliance in the next few weeks. This is part of our ongoing commitment to improve our security and compliance posture. 

At Looppanel, we are on a mission to make user research faster and easier than ever before. We progressed a lot towards this goal in 2023 but have a long way to go. We are set to cover this distance over the next few weeks, months and 2024 as a whole. 

Keep following us to stay updated on our journey. An even better way to stay engaged is to sign up for a free trial: https://app.looppanel.com/signup. 🙂

Published by:

Akash Tandon