Resolving our chatbot UI differences

On our last call on 7/20/23 (click to see notes from our agenda), our team ran into a blocker around the UI for the chatbot and data submission.

Niku proposed using two separate landing pages. Ron and I proposed using just one. Ron and I felt like having one landing page was simpler than having two. We ended the call agreeing that Niku would submit wireframes to further display what he was thinking.

Personally I was a bit nervous because the end date of the hackathon was only about 1.5 weeks out which wasn't a lot of time.

Welp I'm glad we waited! Turns out, his proposed solution was really good and the disagreement came down to the semantics of having "separate landing" pages. Ron and I wanted to have the UI in one visually consistent frame...and so did Niku!

Here's the initial user flow that Niku proposed:

Ron and I had interpreted this to mean that the user would be directed to a completely different landing page, url, and frame. After Niku shared his sketch wireframes, I realized that is not what he had meant by saying "separate landing pages". He meant to keep the same frame but provide different screens.

Below are the sketch wireframes that he shared with us.

As you can see, the left is the chatbot and the right is the area to train the LLM. The frame of the website on both screens is the same. But the layout of the screens for the chatbot is different from submitting data.

TLDR; we were more closely aligned than we had thought and sometimes sketching out wireframes is a faster/clearer way to communicate.