Synapse
Synapse, a research app organized by topic
a mobile app for researchers to find papers and labs and keep up with their field. i designed the core screens and the information architecture in a one-month contract.
final designs
researchers follow fields and questions, but most paper apps are organized around journals and universities.
i organized the app around 26 research topics. i used Figma Make to generate many directions per screen, picked the strongest, and refined every screen and interaction by hand.
eleven core screens across search, a daily digest, and the profile, plus the topic structure and a clickable prototype.
each topic has subtopics, and a gradient on each topic card shows how closely its subtopics relate, without forcing a strict hierarchy.
institutions and labs are part of the main navigation instead of hiding behind search.
TOPICS (26) ├─ neuroscience ─ cognitive · computational · clinical ├─ climate science ─ atmospheric · oceans · modeling └─ AI + machine learning ─ NLP · vision · RL feed · topics · labs · saves
eleven core screens
search opens on topics, institutions, and labs, so people can browse without a query. the digest pulls the top papers from the topics you follow into one short read each day. saved papers live in collections next to your reading history.
how closely the AI should follow a reference depended on the screen.
search is something people already know how to use, so i kept Figma Make close to familiar patterns there. the shelf and the daily digest were newer ideas for the app, so i let it range further and picked from what came back. one setting for every screen would have made search unfamiliar or the digest generic.
each direction Figma Make gave me was its own screen. making eleven of them read as one app, with shared spacing, type, hierarchy, and transitions, was the part i did by hand. the topic structure went the same way: talking it through with Claude let me throw out several structures before drawing anything.