Ask HowNow AI

This is a story about the three seconds before someone decides whether to ask for help or quietly give up and go find the answer somewhere else.

The Challenge

Design the experience of accessing and using HowNow AI from the mobile homepage. Solution should demostrate how a user should:

Discovers HowNow AI from the existing homepage.

Opens the AI experience.

Asks a question.

Receives relevant answers sourced from content inside HowNow.

Understanding the context

Secondary research into the context and the people who'd use HownowAI, before assuming what the problem actually is.

Share & Teach

Share organisational knowledge with others

Track Progress

Understand learning, skills and development progress

Guidance & Coaching

Get personalised help applying knowledge

Comply

Complete required training or certification

Onboard

Understand the organisation, role and processes

Solve

Get knowledge needed to complete a task

Learn

Build knowledge about something new

Why do employees use learning platform?

Who are the users?

New Hire

"I don't even know what I don't know yet".

Goals

  • Get upto speed quickly

  • Understand how things work

  • Become confident and independent

Pain points

  • Doesn't know what they don't know

  • Doesn't know the right terms to search

  • Information is scattered

  • Hesitates to ask basic questions

  • Unsure which information is relevant or up to date

Individual Contributor

"I have a question right now, I don't want to enroll in a course to get it answered".

Goals

  • Get the right knowledge to complete their work

  • Resolve blockers quickly

  • Get back to work without disruption

Pain points

  • Doesn't know what to search

  • Answer is buried inside long term

  • Search gives resources instead of direct answers

  • Unsure which source to trust

  • Doesn't want to interrupt colleagues with simple questions

Manager

“I want my team to become more self-sufficient, but I don't have the time to constantly find, curate and explain knowledge for them.”

Goals

  • Keep the team unblocked

  • Support team learning and development

  • Reduce repetitive questions

Pain points

  • Team members repeatedly ask questions

  • Don't have time to curate learning for every individual

  • Finding a specific resource across a large learning library

People Leaders / HR

“We want people to continuously learn and grow, but learning needs to happen naturally within their work, not as another task they have to complete.”

Goals

  • Build a culture of continuous learning.

  • Improve employee capability and performance.

  • Improve employee experience and retention.

Pain points

  • Learning can feel like an additional task

  • Limited visibility into emerging skill/knowledge gaps

  • Employees don't always know where to go when they need help.

L&D owner

“We have a lot of valuable knowledge, but getting employees to the right knowledge at the moment they need it is difficult.”

Goals

  • Increase engagement and adoption of learning content.

  • Understand learning gaps and content gaps.

  • Keep organisational knowledge relevant and up to date.

Pain points

  • Difficult to understand what employees are actually trying to learn.

  • Content can become outdated or duplicated.

Some of the numbers

3.6 hours

Lost per day employee hunting for information at work

37%

Already ask a generic AI tool instead of an internal system

88%

Organisations are concerned about retention

22%

new hires leave within 90 days, most citing bad experience

Source: Coveo & Arlington Research (2024), TalentLMS (2026), LinkedIn Learning (2025), AIHR

Deep dive into the painpoints

New users

Individual Contributor

General

Don't know what to search for

Don’t know the right terms to search

Don’t know what they don’t know

Doesn’t know if HowNow covers it

Search returns courses, not direct answers



Answer buried in something bigger

Content is scattered across unassigned modules

Knows what to search, not the time for a course

Keyword search returns whole courses, never a direct answer

Can't tell what to trust

Can’t identify which document is current

Two people on the team give two different answers

Can’t tell current docs from stale drafts

Social cost of asking

Hesitate to ask “obvious” questions

Same questions get asked repeatedly

Breaks the flow of work

Quick question pile up when managers are busy

Answer-hunting breaks deep work

Doesn't feel like it's actually helping

Finishing a course feels identical to abandoning one — no sense of progress

Reminders and nudges feel generic, easy to tune out

Every other app they use daily already feels smarter than this one

Scope Definition

Problem

Frequency

Severity

AI leverage

Decision

Don't know what to search

High

High

High

Solve

Answer is buried

High

High

High

Solve

Can't tell what to trust

High

High

High

Solve

Social cost of asking

Medium–High

High

High

Solve

Breaks the flow of work

Medium

Medium

Medium

Later

Doesn't feel like it's actually helping

Medium

Medium

Medium

Later

Some of the consideration

  • It's a custom design for iOS and Android

  • Hownow AI have a good content coverage

  • Hownow AI's LLM model is world class

  • Used dummy homepage and AI Logo

  • It's a dummy home page, bottom navigation and header

  • LMS is connected to different internal systems, so it knows employee profile, needs etc

  • Hownow AI dummy logo and animation

Concept Explorations

Discovery of AI feature

Bottom Navigation

Good for discovery; works for independent features.

Quick question pile up when managers are busy

Good for discovery; works for independent features.

Floating Action Button

FAB was a good invention but overused for chatbots/customer support.

Search + AI

If Search and AI both help users find knowledge, users shouldn't have to decide which one to use.

Feature Banner

For the first time user

Don't know what to search

Answer burried inside something bigger

Beyond the Core Flow

Introducing Hownow AI

Thank You