Help
Start here
- Quick start: from sign-up to presenting
Nine steps, about ten minutes, from an empty account to a prototype that shows its evidence.
- The three layers
Why, the interface and the process, and how you connect them.
- Find your way around
The tree, the centre pane and the inspector.
Account and team
- Sign up, sign in and manage your account
Sign up, sign in with a password or an emailed link, set your profile and password, and make an organisation.
- Add people to your organisation
Invite teammates, accept an invite, and see who has which role.
- Create and rename a project
Start a project for one piece of research, and change its name.
Research
- Add a document
Paste or upload a transcript or notes.
- Highlight and tag a quote
Mark a passage, adjust its length, tag it and find it again.
- Group quotes into a theme
Collect quotes that say the same thing under one name.
- Write an insight from your themes
Write a finding and back it with themes, so a reader can follow it to the quotes.
- Let the AI suggest quotes, themes and insights
Pull quotes from a transcript, group them into themes and draft insights, then keep, review or remove each run.
- Sort quotes on an affinity board
Pile related quotes into clusters and turn a cluster into a theme.
Every board
- Create a board
Make a process diagram, service blueprint, journey map, prototype or affinity board.
- Add pages to a board
Keep separate canvases inside one prototype board: add, rename, reorder and delete pages, and switch with PageUp and PageDown.
- Draft a board with AI
What a draft adds on each kind of board. Drafting itself happens in the Ask AI panel.
- Ask the AI about your research
Ask questions in a panel beside the board, follow each answer to its source, ask for a draft, change the board, and reopen past conversations.
- Save, name and restore versions
Save a copy of a board, go back to it, and use the automatic history.
- Copy shapes out of a version
Open an earlier version, pick shapes, and copy them onto the board.
- Work on a board with other people
See who is on a board, pick your colour, and what happens when two people change the same thing.
- Delete and restore a board
Move a board to the Deleted folder, and bring it back within 30 days.
Diagrams
- Draw a process diagram
Add steps and decisions, join them with arrows, and rename or delete them.
- Add bands to a blueprint or journey map
Split a diagram into bands such as frontstage and backstage, and file steps in them.
Prototypes
- Draw screens and shapes on a prototype
Pick a tool, draw a screen, then boxes, lines and text inside it.
- Lay out a frame in a row or a column
Let a frame place its contents in a row or column, and size them Fixed, Hug or Fill.
- Select, arrange and undo on a prototype
Select, move, resize, stack, delete, snap to guides, and undo.
- Use the right-click menu
Add a shape where you click, rename, delete and zoom on any board; on a prototype, also copy, paste, replace and stack.
- Change colours, corners, borders and text
Colour shapes, round a frame, set the font and type of a text, and set the canvas colour and dot grid.
- Make a prototype clickable
Link elements to screens, and choose where the story starts.
- Draw and edit the arrows to screens
Drag an arrow to a screen, change where it leads, remove it, and undo.
- Change a prototype while it plays with variables
Add named values, bind a label or visibility to one, and set it from a click in Present.
- Make a reusable component
Turn a frame into a component, place copies of it, and change one copy without changing the rest.
- Share components between boards
Mark a prototype board as a library and place its components on other boards in your organisation.
Connecting the layers
- Link evidence to a screen or element
Attach an insight, theme or quote to anything on a prototype, so the why is one click away.
- Link a screen to a process step
Tie a screen to the step it carries out, and see the screens from the step.
- Check what is missing with Coverage
See the screens nothing backs, the insights nothing uses and the themes that went nowhere.
Presenting
- Present your prototype
Click through the screens, and press a key for the why or the process behind each.
- Share a presentation with a link
Make a link that anyone can open with no account, and revoke it when you are done.
- Test a prototype with real people
Set tasks on a prototype, send participants a link, and read how many finished, how long it took and where they missed.
- Read the report and build a deck
Drill from an insight to its quotes, print the report as a PDF, and present a deck built from your evidence.
Reference
- Keyboard shortcuts
Every key that does something, by where you are.
- Glossary
What each term in Research Mate means.
- Limits and how long things are kept
How often you can do things, how big things can be, and how long deleted items stay.