This post has the same issues as NotebookLM for me -- overdesigned, overengineered for what at its core is a simple and valuable UX.

NotebookLM: obviously useful, but I just wanna select some files and chat w/ them or have them summarized for me. It's got low info density, way too many cards/buttons/sections/icons, and it makes the core UX really difficult for me to navigate.

This post: I wanted to know what cool thoughts he had while designing it. Instead I get some weird scrolljacking, image carousels, unnecessary visual hierarchy, cards galore, etc.

Not trying to be too negative, it's slick and all but it just gets in the way for me instead of disappearing.

There’s a lot of great things here that I like - adaptive 3 panel structure, source viewer on left.

But I think there are a few things that I noticed about NBLM which was painful for me.

1// The three panels should be toggle based with icons on the top bar. There is no need to occupy real estate for both notes and chat together if they are not being used together.

2// The center of screen or the largest middle section should be focused on outputs and not chat. If you are focusing on creating something why should it be on the side. Especially since chat isn’t all that special a feature compared to the audio overviews, etc.

3// Information density - the buttons and icons are all too large and clunky. You are in fight for real estate because AI is helping you process superhuman amounts of information.

I think the magic of NBlM is the audio overviews, the chat based Q&A is with citation is pretty standard for all LLMs.

Also I think it only uses Gemini flash which feels like a search model - this needs to be paired with a reasoning model instead.

I use NotebookLM everyday. The simplicity of the design is much appreciated. However, there are real issues scaling the design and keeping it user friendly as the team keeps adding new features.

The most recent example of this is with the addition of 2 new capabilities (Flashcards and Quiz), "Artifacts Button Container" now has 6 large buttons, and is 328px in height! There are users who are accessing the site from small screen devices in India and they have been asking for help on Discord forums because they cannot see their notes anymore. So I had to create a Tampermonkey script to let users collapse it.[0] I heard the team is fixing that soon, but they should have done more testing before releasing it.

There are other issues like this that I've fixed with scripts. The strangest one is the "notes." Why force the users read a 2000 word essay in a 360px sidebar? So I wrote a script I wrote to let you pop it into full screen mode.[1]

Another example is the chat input field. The follow up questions are hardly usable at all. And they're not stable after you select them.

I can go on all day, but I think it's better to fix things than to complain.

[0] https://gist.github.com/volkanunsal/94db50629cad816eca84c836...

[1] https://gist.github.com/volkanunsal/fded9124d62422c0d2672b8a...

This is my website! I love seeing everyone’s perspective, design is all about iteration and constant evolution. I have no doubt NLM will continue to evolve and change. I feel immensely lucky to have been there towards the beginning of that evolution.

As I designer I was trying to skate to where the puck was going technically. We’d get some insight on what was coming from the model side and we’d try to build UI around that future before it arrived. The labs team at Google has done a solid job of trying to build with that mentality.

We were in a mad dash for 1.5 years launching early and listening to user feedback then iterating our way to where the product landed. As I mentioned, those close to me knew how all consuming this process became. It was an amazing time taking a new product from 0 to 1 inside Google.

I Definitely never expected my portfolio site to make the rounds like this!

I don't care much for NotebookLM's UX. I find the layout confusing, the concepts conveyed in the UI not very intuitive. I feel like the power of what's under the hood doesn't translate very well into the frontend.

That said, this article was a very nice overview. Clean page, interesting to see his perspective. He clearly took tare and thought about the project. I don't agree with his conclusions and results, but that's just one user. Hopefully we see more thoughtful approaches. The space moving so quickly doesn't exactly foster a craftsman-like care in design.

As a non-user who just played with the podcast thing a while back, is notebooklm actually better than just using something like Claude Projects to dump all your files into it, and then chatting with it in that project?

Other than the podcast thing of course which is unique.

Mostly curious about perspectives of folks who used both and can compare them.

Love the context size and podcasts but never understood the UX. Why notes? Is there a difference between my notes and AI notes? Guess that's not my mental model of working with papers (Phd in psy) or I'm just spoiled by elicit.

The idea of multiple files upload and audio creation with it does not go well with me. How does it choose which topics it should concentrate on? What is the idea behind multiple files upload on a single notebooklm project. I am struggling to understand that.

The user interface has been confusing to me. And note, I have built some projects using notebooklm https://asimov.learntosolveit.com

Any reason why when I upload a set of books to NotebookLM and have an interesting conversation about them with NotebookLM, the conversation is not stored? I can't revisit it later, I can't continue from there. I don't understand why they changed the UX/UI from the other AI solutions (Gemini or GPT).

I also don't get why NotebookLM refuses to write things either, I can't make it write an essay based on the information I fed through PDFs or other files.

NotebookLM has been one of the more useful projects I've used. Being able to focus a language processing model directly to the content you're looking for is really useful.

I currently support a data application where the vendor's documentation for it is not particularly well organized. It's spread across dozens of PDFs, sometimes without particularly well reasoned organization. Dumping all those PDFs into NotebookLM has been extremely useful since it allows us to ask questions that either give us answers, or are immediately fruitless requiring us to contact the vendor. Having an LLM capable of processing all that text has been great.

I've also used it with tabletop roleplaying game manuals. It's especially useful for badly organized TTRPGs, or those with poor indexing. Being able to type a question out in the middle of a game and getting an answer without having to dig through the book and find it yourself can be really very useful.

What I've never found a use for is anything in the Studio pane. They're neat tools, but... it's never been anything I've wanted or needed.

I'm curious from people who use it regularly. What do you use it for? Aside from audio overviews, what does it do better for you compared to vanilla chat interfaces or docs integration?

I stopped using NotebookLM after one use. Not sure what’s the fuss aside from the podcast generation gimmick

I replay liked the design of NLM, and thought it was a great implementation of using LLMs beyond a simple chat. Well done.

i think the main star of notebooklm is the audio model and the ux gets in the way of that

and if you're not very clear about what drove notebooklm's success you might be at risk of cargo culting ALL of their process instead of just focusing on the thing that worked.

I would've preferred the original design. You can't even resize each panel - why can't I read a summary by itself without the chat taking up 2/3 of the screen?

I have never understood the distinction between "Chat" and "Studio". I can to the same things in both places for the most part. I find I spend all of my time in Chat and then wonder if I'm supposed to be doing things in "Studio". I just find myself hiding it for the most part.

I really wish NotebookLM would hurry up and open a payment tier where they don't harvest your data. We'd love to deploy it across our org but control of sensitive information is a requirement.

NotebookLM is extremely badly engineered: The large downloads don't work in mobile browsers. For the longest time, the downloads were in wav format which doesn't make any sense. The mobile app lacks much of the functionality too. The generated audio is often about an altogether different topic than the one I requested. And don't get me started about the quality of the speech -- it still has an occasional "third voice" problem that just doesn't fit in. Overall, I would say its UI fits the culture of shipping utter crap, and I would never hire any designer of that team.