As the dust settles on COVID-19's first wave, we can ask ourselves: who are the unsung heroes that helped get us through it? There's no doubt that our biggest heroes are the NHS staff, teachers and key frontline workers who've toiled night and day at great risk to keep vital services running.

By quarantining we've all played our small part in protecting these workers, often at great personal cost. Helping us minimise this cost has been the work of less well-known heroes. These are the charities, mutual aid groups and non-profits propping up society by looking after our communities, the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. But quarantining suddenly forced many of these services to go digital or go bust, turning a difficult job into an almost impossible one.

Who helps the helpers?

In a short amount of time, the COVID-19 pandemic dealt volunteer support services three knockout blows:

1. An overwhelming surge in issues related to mass unemployment, poverty, health, bereavement, isolation, mental health, addiction and much more. This created a situation where support services were needed by the population more than ever before.
2. At the same time, there was no money to pay for those services as traditional funding channels collapsed with the closing of charity shops and cancellation of fundraising events, all amidst the prospect of the deepest recession in decades.
3. And finally these services, which traditionally had been offered in person by volunteers on the ground, now had to be served digitally.

This is what happens to volunteer services when they need digital help:

How does a volunteer service dealing with unprecedented demand immediately move online, with no budget?

A new type of volunteer is needed in a crisis like this, a voluntrepreneur - tech savvy, equipped with digital skills, and thanks to furloughing schemes, plenty of time to build solutions and help.

And to get our support services back online, we needed a new kind of workforce, a digital home front. Here's how I contributed to creating this workforce and the amazing impact it's had supporting those in need around the world.

Building the voluntrepreneur workforce

At the start of the crisis, a Slack group was created for technologists who wanted to help. Some friends and I quickly joined the rapidly growing community, which started calling itself code4covid.

What set this group of people apart was that it was filled with highly skilled individuals. Senior staff from companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Developers, designers, marketers, project managers, entrepreneurs. All trying to figure out how they could put their skills to good use.

However, I grew concerned that many of the proposed solutions weren't tackling the most vital problems. Despite best intentions, the volunteers weren't always finding ways to help the people experiencing the worst of this.

So I set out to fix that.

Tech support for those supporting others

My birthday this year was memorable in that it fell on the first day of lockdown. So I cancelled my plans and I created Covid Tech Support instead.

It started out as a tech helpdesk for anyone needing help with tech because of COVID-19. To begin with, it was a Google Form and a phone number, both of which brought you to me, and I used my tech experience to help as best as I could.

I simply wanted to see if anyone would even use the service. It didn't take long for the number of requests for help to become overwhelming...

In the beginning it was mostly mutual aid groups needing help setting up Google docs for their community or looking for online tools they could use.

But I was soon getting requests for developers, managers and designers. Demanding bigger commitments than solving standalone problems. These were coming from projects looking to tackle problems such as contact tracing, volunteer management and socially distanced shopping. And increasingly, charities and non-profits trying to take their services online and not knowing where to start.

Finding code4covid community members who could work on Covid Tech Support help requests

I'd already furloughed myself so that I could work on this full-time but could no longer handle the requests on my own, so I turned to the code4covid community for help.

I began matching community members to help requests, connecting those with the specific skillsets needed by organisations seeking support. And because the community was now my most valuable resource, I took the lead in managing it and actively growing its membership.

Word of mouth and some good press caused traffic to Covid Tech Support to grow and grow. I streamlined my operation with the support of organisations such as Intercom, Airtable, Slack, Typeform, Mailchimp, Zapier and Paiger who kindly donated their services for free.

Becoming a voluntrepreneur

At each step of the way I put my entrepreneurial experience to good use. I sought out users before I built anything and validated the concept by manually providing the service myself. Doing this time and time again taught me which parts of the process needed to be automated, and I hustled for off-the-shelf solutions wherever possible. I tracked website visits, submissions, volunteer matches, social shares and set targets.

I partnered with other digital support services such as AbilityNet, Digital Candle and My April to share projects and resources. I've also been feeding what I've learned to the Greater London Authority to help plan their response and helped guide the Western Cape government in South Africa in setting up their own GoDigital initiative.

From start up to scale up: building the volunteer dream team

I soon reached a point where I was becoming the bottleneck in keeping things running and would need to start delegating. I needed my own digital support team, and of course, I already had the perfect community in which to find them.

I soon built a code4covid team made up of marketers, managers and designers concerned with growing and engaging the community. With their help, we now have over 1500 volunteers from all over the world.

I also created a Covid Tech Support team of product and project managers, skilled in understanding project needs, identifying suitable talent and experts in communication. This team has successfully matched volunteers to over 150 projects and continues to deal with 10-20 new projects a week.

One of my personal highlights has been working with this group of excellent individuals, getting to know them and sharing in their commitment and dedication.

What happens when you supercharge charities with a digital expert

The success of Covid Tech Support is down to our volunteers' hard work in the organisations we place them into. In three short months we've contacted 550 volunteers and placed over 250 of them.

We've heard amazing stories from the organisations we've supported. For instance, we put together a team of web developers to help Crisis build a 'free webstore' for homeless shelters in 1 week. One of our designers helped Mencap design an accessible directory for local disability support services. An amazing product manager led a team that prevented Afyah from closing down and raised funding so that it could continue to support underprivileged women.

Having provided volunteer help and management to hundreds of projects at this point, the Covid Tech Support team believe that the efforts of our community of digital volunteers will have indirectly impacted thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of the most vulnerable people during the crisis.

The benefits of being a voluntrepreneur

Many of the community are currently furloughed or unemployed, and so benefit from putting their skills to good use, trying new things out, meeting others during a time of isolation and gaining new professional and personal experience. Some have even found new jobs as a result.

We've worked with volunteers who have helped on multiple projects, who remain involved for months and who get their friends in on it. For me, it's all about hearing the heartwarming feedback from the projects we've supported, the difference our volunteers have made to people's lives and the amazing people I get to work with. As an extra bonus, I'm also excited to have been shortlisted for the 'Digital Volunteer Award' at this year's Tech4GoodAwards.

The Digital Home Front

So far I've listed code4covid and Covid Tech Support's successes, but I've come to learn that we're only one operation in an ecosystem of amazing digital support. Since we started I've had the pleasure of discovering similar services like Digital Boost and Furlonteer, localised versions such as Scottish Tech Army and Digital Brighton and Hove, and skill specific services such as Tandem (for marketers) and Helpful Engineering (for hardware).

Each with their own community of skilled volunteers that self-organised in response to a national crisis. Together forming a digital home front, unsung heroes supporting the heroes helping us on the frontline.

And if there's one thing to take from this post, it's that as we look forward and prepare for the possibility of a second wave, there's comfort in knowing that this time we're prepared. The digital home front workforce is in place and I'm proud to have played my small part in putting it together.

But I couldn't have done it alone. I could write an entire blog post about these individuals and the contributions they've made. Thanks to Jules Decol and Cinzia Riccardione for starting the original Slack group. Freddie Fforde for inviting me to it, setting up and leading the initial steering group and coming up with the name Covid Tech Support. Also everyone in that steering group, including Josh Russell, Mike Butcher, Jan Baykara, Ed Saperia, Nathan Young, Eloise Todd. And also to my teams at code4covid and Covid Tech Support, Cristina Munteanu for all of her amazing support, Eleanor Whiston for helping me plan for the future, and the entire voluntrepreneur community.

Also big thanks to Sarah Thickett, Tim Hanson, Freddie, Victoria Collins, Cinz, Cristina, Eleanor and Ruko for giving feedback on this post.

If you need help during the COVID-19 crisis, then let us know here. Or you can help us reach those who may need our help by following us on social media. Or if you have valuable digital skills, from full stack development to social media management, join us today and find a project you'd like to help with.

I'd love to hear how you've helped during the COVID-19 pandemic. Leave your comments below.

We spend over 6 hours a day online. Over half of that is spent on a personal computer reading webpages through a web browser, meaning that 20% of our day is spent within a single application.

The most popular browsers are Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox and Opera. Behind the scenes, they have powerful engines that render webpages, compile Javascript, stream digital media and so on.

However, as the user, all you can do is view webpages. And that's kind of it. Sure you can open tabs, save bookmarks and search the web, but these are all just roundabout ways of viewing more webpages. And it's been that way for over two decades.

What if the browser could do more for you? What if it could talk to you while you're online?

In this post I'm going to introduce a new UX for interacting with information online. A chatbot, built into the web browser, that chats with you while you surf the web.

I'll be looking into questions like:

• What's wrong with the way you browse the web today?
• What is a conversational browser?
• What if my web browser could comment on the webpages I'm looking at?
• What if I could respond to it and have a conversation about what I'm doing online?
• What if it could suggest ways it can help me in that moment?

Here's an example of what this means.

You're shopping for a camera on Amazon. There are lots of things you can do on this webpage: purchase the item, browse pictures, read user reviews, etc. So far this is all very familiar, you can do this in any web browser.

This is where the conversational browser steps in and says:

What's happening here is that the browser is understanding that you're shopping online and it is actively trying to figure out how to help you. It's interacting with you through a conversation so that you can guide it.

In this article, I'm going to dive deeper into this example use case and flesh out how a conversational web browser could work, its interface and the benefits it could bring to everyone who uses the internet.

How many tabs do you have open right now?

It's likely that you don't spend all that much time thinking about your web browser. It already works well enough, so why would you need to consider interacting with the web in a different way? Usually all you need to do online is visit a webpage, read some information and then you're done and on to the next one.

But web browsing can get complicated very quickly, with your simple website visit turning into a journey. The more time you spend online, the more likely you are to think of new questions to ask and new things to do.

But this non-linear path-finding can lead to frustrating experiences, such as:

• Too many tabs open
• Copying and pasting from one website to another
• Trying to re-find something you looked at online a couple of days ago
• Re-entering the same information on multiple different websites
• Having to do several searches on Google to find what you're looking for
• Maintaining open tabs with incomplete tasks waiting to be finished
• Having information on your desktop that you need on your phone, and vice versa

Despite the many benefits of tabbed browsing, as you can see they are also the source of many frustrations with the web. Tabs were introduced by Mozilla in 2003 as a popular way of allowing you to browse non-linearly. They allow you to spin up new online enquiries without disrupting existing ones and they enable complex information finding.

However, even with tabbed browsing, you're still restricted to dealing with only one website at a time while the others are put on hold. Plus, tabs introduce a new cognitive burden on you: the switching cost of changing tabs, having to remember what's going on in each tab, the hassle of moving information from one tab into another, and so on. This cognitive load is the cause of many of the frustrations outlined above.

Why it helps to have a browser that can talk to you

Web browsers work through a request-response pattern. You make a request and the browser responds.

The set of possible requests is mostly restricted to "show me this website", "search for this" or "click on this". In each case, the browser's only response is to show a webpage.

Complicated requests like "should I buy this camera?" cannot be answered by your browser (or Alexa or Siri for that matter).

Instead, you have to break that question down into manageable requests that your browser can handle:

With tabbed browsing, you can open up new tabs to set up each of these requests whenever they occur to you. But each must be resolved individually, one at a time. And the questions have to occur to you in the first place. And you must remember to complete them.

A conversational browser is able to make its own requests. In responding to your request to show a website, it can infer that you may have other questions you'd like to ask.

In this way, you never need to ask the complex question "should I buy this camera?". Instead it can be extrapolated from your behaviour in the browser i.e. viewing the camera on a website like Amazon.

The browser can then predict what your next request is likely to be (such as searching for alternative prices) so it can immediately get to work in finding responses. Once it has a set of responses, it can make its own request to you to ask what you want to do next.

By making its own requests, a browser can pre-emptively resolve complex information needs and guide your decision-making using only a single tab and a handful of clicks.

This turns your browser into a digital assistant for getting things done online. But it's not trying to replace search engines and webpages the way Siri and Alexa do, instead it's trying to replace tabs and manual browsing effort. Because of this, a browser that talks to you is a potential next step in how we interact with the web.

Now, before I go into how this interaction could look and feel, let's start by thinking about what a conversational browser should do.

A conversational web browser is…

Helpful where web browsers currently can't help

A conversational web browser must help the user in some meaningful way. Its purpose is not to be a toy or a game. It's an assistant that is the personification of what the browser is already doing: helping people access information and make decisions online.

The best way to judge if a service provided by the conversational browser is genuinely helpful is to ask, does this service:

• Save time?
• Reduce the number of websites that need to be visited?
• Reduce the number of tabs that need to be open?
• Do something that isn't already possible to do on the website?
• Combine information from several websites?
• Get information from a non-user friendly data source such as an API?
• Provide browser-only insight such as keeping track of tasks across multiple tabs/days?
• Connect different devices?

Unobtrusive and a light touch

No matter how helpful, an assistant that keeps intruding into your workflow can become annoying very fast.

When interacting with the user, the browser should:

• Only chat to the user when it can genuinely help, otherwise it should stay out of the way
• Use the user's context and actions as much as possible to judge whether they need help or not. Assume they don't.
• Communicate simply, sparingly and to the point.
• Give the user options and let them tailor their experience, but not provide too many options at once.
• Be easy to move around, hide and customise.
• Provide help with only a couple of clicks (ideally a single click).
• Require no spoken language or typed input.
• Be friendly, playful and fun to use.

Flexible to any information need

Web browsers can already render information in thousands of different ways to cater for a countless number of information needs. A conversational browser should also be flexible enough to work on any website and display any kind of information or media. It should easily allow users to follow different information pathways from the same starting point.

Respectful of privacy

A browser that talks to you is inevitably also going to be a web browser that watches what you do online. Where possible, all conversational dialogue processing should occur within the browser and communication with 3rd parties minimised. The user should have visibility and control over the conversational browser's usage of data and storage.

A speculative vision for a conversational web browser

A conversational web browser is, at its simplest, a web browser with a chatbot built into it.

But what is a chatbot built into a web browser? What does it say and how does it work?

Have a play with the demo below to get an idea of what this means. It's interactive, press the Get Started button to give it a go:

Once you're done with that, let me explain what's going on piece by piece.

Chat thread

The base layer of the conversational browser is the chat thread. It's made up of speech bubbles, timestamps and avatars. New messages scroll from bottom to top. Different colours represents different participants.

The aim is for it to be familiar to anybody who's used any messaging service:

The chat thread is managed by the browser itself. Because of this, it can appear over any website shown in the browser, it does not need the website's permission to appear.

Kind of like the bots built by Intercom, except not restricted to a single website and not only dealing with customer service support.

And... there's not much else to say about the chat thread design because it follows standard chat design conventions.

Instead, the main subject of this article will be the dialogue between browser and user wherein lies the core user experience. But before I dive into that, I'll briefly go over the widget.

Widget

Opening and closing the chat thread is achieved by clicking the on-page widget.

The widget is flexible and can be moved or hidden if dragged to the corner of the screen.

The widget only appears whenever the browser has something to say, otherwise it is hidden by default. When the browser has something very important to say, it shows a notification or a speech bubble to get your attention.

You can think of the widget as a lightweight, remote control into the denser, richer chat interface.

Browser Dialogue

A browser that chats to you needs to have something important to say.

Imagine having a friend or assistant sitting next to you while you're online, reading the same webpages you are. Except they're also looking up other things online that may help you and sharing them with you. They're commenting and pointing out things you might have missed. They're thinking three steps ahead of you. And they like to send you funny gifs and jokes.

This is what it should feel like when a browser talks to you. Chatting to the browser should feel like chatting to another person online. The tone of the dialogue should be informative, but interspersed with emojis, gifs and images to make it more conversational.

A great example of this is the financial chatbot app Cleo, which gives genuinely helpful money saving tips while being fun to interact with.

To reinforce the idea that the browser is chatting to you in real time, loading times can be masked by showing an 'is typing' state familiar to conventional chat interfaces.

There are three reasons why a browser may wish to say something to you:

1. To show it's understood something that you've done online
2. To ask for your input
3. To help

The first reason may not seem that obvious, but it is important that the browser informs you of what it thinks is going on so that you can establish the context for the rest of the conversation. As a result, every conversation should start with the browser acknowledging what you're doing online in a way that's relevant to its upcoming dialogue.

This makes it easier for you to understand why the browser needs input from you and how it can help, which I'll explore further in the next sections.

User Dialogue

Conversation requires dialogue from both sides. However, having to use your voice or type messages to your browser would add an unwanted extra workload. So how can we get around that?

In practice, you already use natural language to interact with the web every time you use a search engine. And these searches are easily observed by the browser.

By observing searches and other online interactions, the conversational browser can gather enough input from you to begin the conversation. What this means is that you can contribute your side of the conversation with the browser by simply doing what you already do online. That is, doing searches, reading webpages, clicking links and so on.

These actions are added to the chat thread as your own contributions to the conversation:

The result is that you never need to start a conversation with the browser, you just use the web as normal and the browser reacts to you. This also means that the chat thread captures a handy track record of your activities online which also helps to contextualise messages from the browser.

The concept of surfing the web as a dialogue between you and the browser was the subject of my PhD thesis. You can read more about how this affects search engines on my post about Dynamic Information Retrieval.

User Choices

The second reason a browser may want to speak with you is to ask for your input, as it may need your guidance before it can effectively help you.

The flexibility of the chat thread means that many input actions are possible, for instance, here are buttons and dropdown menus:

Clicking on an option lets the browser know what it should do in situations where there may be many ways it can help you. Each choice gets added to the ongoing dialogue as if you typed it.

Your choices trigger browser behaviour and potentially more choices, giving the browser flexibility for working with you to navigate through a complex information need with only a couple of clicks.

Altogether, this means that the way you chat to the browser is entirely through your actions online and your choices within the chat.

Third Party Dialogue

The main aim of the conversational browser is to help you. The most common way for it to do that is to find information from other websites for you.

Because the chatbot is contained within the browser itself, it is capable of retrieving information from the web on your behalf. It can do this in the background without you needing to intervene.

When information has been found from a third party, it can be added to the chat thread as if the third party were a participant in the conversation. This makes the third party easily identifiable as the source of the content.

The flexibility of the chat means that there is no limit to what can get added. Any media that can be embedded on a website can appear in the chat thread. And as chats progress, more third parties may take part.

This opens up the conversational experience from being a one-to-one with the web browser, to being a group chat with the whole world wide web.

Automation for the web

It's easy to embed interactive media from third parties into the chat thread. This means that over time, the chat thread becomes less about conversation, and more of an interface to useful services online. Similar to how WeChat works in Asia.

You can think of each third party contribution as a tab that doesn't need to be opened, a search that didn't need to be made and a website that didn't need to be visited. The browser is browsing the web for you. It's automation for the web. And all of it controllable from a single webpage with a click.

When the browser is automatically responding to simple online requests, you can focus on the bigger questions instead. Questions like, "should I buy this camera?", without having to expend effort in thinking about how you're going to get all the information you need.

Automation also lets you tap into established and effective online browsing patterns for getting things done. For instance, you may not think to watch a video review when shopping online, but would find it useful to watch one when it's suggested by the browser.

In this way, the browser reduces the mental effort of using the web by being your online guide.

Dialogue Triggers

The conversational browser won't try to chat to you about every little thing you do online. It waits for a trigger before it decides to chat. Triggers are in-browser observations of things you do online, such as:

• Visiting a specific website.
• Visiting a type of website (such as news, shopping etc.).
• Visiting a website containing a certain type of information (i.e. an address, a video etc.).
• Clicking links or buttons on webpages.

Triggers work in a similar way to how Zapier or IFTTT works, except restricted to things that happen in the web browser only. Once a trigger has fired, then the chat widget will appear and the browser will begin a dialogue with you. Your choices within the chat, or any subsequent actions taken in the browser, may then fire new triggers.

Tasks

Triggers help the browser identify what kind of task you're doing online. For instance, a shopping task will be triggered by a visit to Amazon, whereas a news task will be triggered by reading a news article.

The conversational browser will respond to different tasks in different ways.

For example, during a shopping task the browser may help you by finding alternative prices for the item you're looking at. Or when you're reading a news article, the browser may show you what people are saying about the article's content on social media.

Each conversation between the browser and the user is based around an individual task, and each task will have different triggers.

It's often the case that a task will be completed over several webpages. This means that the conversation will carry over from one website to the next, with each contributing a little more to the chat thread.

The same is true if related websites are opened in different tabs.

If you change from one task to another while browsing the web, then the chat thread displayed by the browser will also switch. You'll only see the conversation relevant to the website that currently has your focus.

This also applies to tabbed browsing, meaning it is possible to have multiple ongoing chat threads running depending on which tab you have open, similar to how you may have different chat threads with different friends online.

The browser is intelligent enough to identify when tasks have changed or have become idle and will start new conversations accordingly.

What this means is that the browser isn't just having one conversation with you, it's running several, contextually relevant lines of dialogue that can help wherever your focus is at that moment in time.

Dialogue History

Over time, new messages get added to each task's chat thread with the browser. This becomes a history of the browser's conversation with you. An interactive timeline of websites you've visited, the interactions you've had and the important information you found.

Built into the conversational browser is a dashboard where these chats are grouped into task-specific threads that are easy to scroll through and search.

The effect is that each chat thread is a smart web history that allows you to finally close those open tabs because you can easily jump back into old tasks and pick up where you left off.

Here's the demo again if you'd like to have another go at it now that you've read all about its design:

What's Next?

The design for the conversational browser came about while building a product called Context Scout, which was created by myself and my co-founder Andy O'Harney. After coming through the Entrepreneur First programme, we have spent the past four years trying to build a business around getting browsers to do more to help people online. We've prototyped the technology as a Chrome browser add-on and experimented with different target markets.

Over that time, I've written about the limitations of search engines and how having a smart browser is like having a GPS for the web. Our former lead designer Emily Sappington also wrote about contextual AI for the browser and beyond.

The biggest challenge of productising the conversational browser is not so much the design, but building a coherent product message around a tool that has potentially thousands of use cases. The concept is intentionally generic, which makes it hard to identify with users about their particular online problems.

Further to this, there are flaws in this design that still need to be addressed:

• It's easy to overwhelm the user with too many options.
• Important functionality can be buried under too many conversation branches.
• Finding the right balance between showing information the user needs but not overwhelming them.
• Not being annoying.

Personalising the experience would be a way to minimise these problems. Given enough time and data, the browser could learn the types of task the user likes to do online, and how they like to do them. With this, it could automate most of the interactions needed to get things done.

And given enough users, the conversational browser could learn about new tasks and workflows by observing the collective effort of how people do things online.

Mobile Devices

48% of internet access now comes through mobile devices. A question I often get asked is whether this technology is suitable for mobile, and if not, does that mean it'll soon be irrelevant.

Mobile web usage is very different to desktop usage. Research shows that information needs on mobile tend to be localised and related to answering specific questions. Further, screen real estate is scarce and the internet is usually accessed through siloed, targeted apps i.e. shopping on the Amazon app, reading news on a news app etc.

The conversational browser works better with complex information needs, helping with scenarios where you're likely to open multiple tabs. It's these types of information needs that we tackle during the 3.5 hours per day we spend accessing the internet on our desktops.

Nonetheless, there is potential for the conversational browser to work on mobile, in tandem with desktop internet usage. Instead of embedding the chat thread within the browser itself, it could be displayed through an app on your mobile device.

In this way, chatting to the browser on your phone while you're at your desk will be no different to chatting to your friends on your phone.

The browser's messages and notifications could appear on your mobile while you browse the web on your desktop. This would open up the possibility for cross-device services. Services that are triggered by actions on your desktop but lead to apps being opened and used on your mobile

Over time and with enough traction, the conversational browser could start as a browser plug-in, move over to a complementary mobile app and then transition back onto the desktop as its own app, making it a cross-device, fully-fledged conversational web browser.

Conclusion

I've spent years thinking about the future of the web and how our interface to it could be improved. Web browsing technology still feels the same as it did 10 or 20 years ago and I strongly believe that disruption is on its way.

I wrote this article to share what we've learned so far and suggest one potential future interface for the web. Nonetheless, the conversational browser is more than just an interface. Programming it to deal with potentially thousands of tasks online with branching dialogue options requires a unique information architecture which I will talk about in a future blog post.

These ideas are not solely my own. Huge thanks to Andrew O'Harney, Stefano Bragaglia and Emily Sappington who contributed. Also to Sarah Thickett and Tim Hanson who kindly provided comments on this article.

Every early stage startup always has one eye on their runway, and applying for a research grant is an attractive way of extending it.

But the applications process is slow, tedious and has a low chance of success. And for those startups who do succeed, grant funding introduces new challenges and can amplify existing problems.

In this guide, I'm going to help you figure out if an Innovate UK grant is right for you and your startup, and help you apply.

• How to know if your startup is ready for an Innovate UK grant
• What you should be thinking about when applying for a grant
• What you should be thinking about when managing an Innovate UK grant
• Tips for managing the grant money so you get the most out of it
• Why winning a grant is about more than cash in your bank
• Where else you could be looking for equity-free money to help fund your business

How to know if your startup is ready for an Innovate UK grant

Applying for a grant is no small task. You're about to commit several months and potentially thousands of pounds, with no guarantee of success. As such, it's worth taking some time to make sure it's the right thing to do for you.

The main question you want to ask is whether you need the grant to resolve a research question or a Product Market Fit (PMF) question.

You do not want to be applying for a grant if you're still early in answering the PMF question. That doesn't mean that you need to be a scale-up pulling in £1m ARR to even think about applying, it just means you need to at least be confident that your product idea works and can sell.

Why it's tempting to use a grant to solve your PMF problem

Every new venture struggles with PMF at some point.

Translating a founder's brilliant insight into something a user wants to use and a market wants to buy, is tough. It requires experimentation, iteration and patience. And no matter how you are funding yourself, you're likely to be watching your accounts excruciatingly count down to the end of your runway with mounting concern.

So, in order to push that runway deadline as far into the future as possible, it’s tempting to try to acquire whatever cash you can, wherever you can. And grants are attractive because, in some sense, it's 'free money'. It's equity-free and it doesn't need to be paid back.

But they're called research grants and not product market fit grants for a reason. Product development is not research (at least, in the Innovate UK sense) and it requires a different skillset and resources to accomplish.

One way to test if you have a research question is to ask the question: does R&D improve my product, or does my product require R&D to exist? If your product cannot exist without some R&D, then establishing PMF before you apply for grants is crucial. For some deep tech companies, it may be impossible to validate the product without some R&D, but these companies tend to emerge from universities where there is already support for the technology and a known market need for it.

The best place for your small business to be is with an existing, selling product that needs grant money to do R&D to either improve the product or to launch a new feature. To grow your business rather than establish it.

Why it's a bad idea to use grant capital to establish PMF

Applying for a grant is a time investment you make so that you can access more money (and time). But even with a successful application, you've now introduced admin, bureaucracy and rigid multi-month commitments into what should be a flexible, adaptive early-stage organisation. Plus, the capital introduces new constraints that can incentivise harmful behaviours:

• Tying yourself to objectives that may stop making sense to the business, but remain on your roadmap so that you can unlock the Innovate UK cash.
• In the 6+ months that can elapse between application submission and project start, the project may not even be viable anymore.
• Hiring researchers who make sense to the grant but not to your business.
• Increasing technical debt disproportionally faster than learning about your market.
• Spending money on tools and data for which you don't need, but which you feel obliged to acquire to avoid losing your budget.

Grant applications are a lot of work and have a low chance of success. The key point is, all of this is time and money you're not spending on establishing PMF as quickly and efficiently as possible. For a new business without PMF, any of these risks can delay your efforts sufficiently enough to kill your startup.

So, before committing to an Innovate UK application, it's worth asking yourself if you're honestly just trying to establish PMF. A lack of PMF is the #1 problem I see when people ask me to help with their applications.

What you should be thinking about when applying for a grant

Grant competitions are fairly frequent but have a low chance of success (anywhere from 5% to 30% according to these official figures), so make sure to prepare properly in order to minimise the time and cash you need to commit to winning one.

The first thing you should know is that Innovate UK publishes grant competitions throughout the year. They have smart competitions and challenge-led competitions. The smart competitions are open to any project and as a result are more competitive, so try to apply to a challenge-led one if you can. The challenge-led competitions are aligned around the type of R&D the government is interested in investing in at the time, so it's worth keeping an eye on the news for any announcements that may lead to a future competition. You can sign up to Innovate UK's mailing list to be told of upcoming grants.

Depending on the competition, there will be different grant sizes available for different project lengths. Typically, each competition will have a large number of small grants of £25k to £500k for projects between 6 to 18 months, and a small number of large grants of £500k to £2m+ for longer, bigger projects.

Once you've picked a competition, you'll need to complete the application process. Writing the application is a full-time job that can take weeks to get right. Get started at least a month before the deadline and be prepared to set aside a few full working days to get it over the line.

The application process is tricky to complete. Each competition usually publishes a guide that lays out its aims and talks you through the application process. The competition organisers also host seminars and webinars. These are worth attending as they give you vital clues for how best to pitch your project. It's also worth reviewing past winners to see what they did (you can usually find them online) or else try reaching out and asking past winners if they can share their documents and experience.

Some competitions require collaborations with universities or other businesses. Make sure that this is agreed in principle before starting your application as it can take a while to set up and cause problems down the road if done incorrectly.

If your grant is unsuccessful, then the assessors will share your scores and their remarks with you. Many applicants do not succeed first time, but you can make use of this feedback to reapply with an improved application.

What you'll need to know when writing your application

The application itself is a long form that needs to be filled in with:

• A project summary
• How the project fits the competition aims
• The business need for the project
• How the project will be completed
• The team
• The market
• How the project will change the business's route to market
• Wider impacts the project will have
• How the project will be managed
• Project risks
• Why the project needs a grant
• An overview of the costs

There are strict limits on the number of words that can be used on each section, so each statement needs to be carefully crafted to contain as much pertinent information as possible in the space available. In particular, grant assessors like to see specific statements and keywords. There's a certain art to writing the application that takes experience to get right.

On top of that, you're competing against established companies and grant writers who know exactly how to write the application - and in fact it's my recommendation that you should get help from a grant writer, particularly if it's your first grant. But, it will set you back thousands of pounds for the application, and usually a small percentage of the grant as a success bonus. We used a grant writer and I doubt we would have been successful without their help (feel free to contact me and I can recommend the one we used).

Bear in mind that a grant writer's job is not to write the whole application for you. You will still need to commit your time, because only you can come up with the project strategy and write all of the statements for the form. What the grant writer will do is help you plan your strategy and make it attractive to Innovate UK. The bulk of their work will be in editing the application form to say as much as possible in the allotted space, while retaining everything Innovate UK wants to see - which can be the difference between a failed and successful application.

Our grant was written over the course of a month, and probably took a full week or two's worth of research, meetings, writing, editing etc. We applied for a challenge-led competition with the help of a grant writer and were borderline accepted in our first attempt.

What you should be thinking about when managing an Innovate UK grant

If you've been successful with your grant application, it's essential that you set up a good plan and management practices so you can keep the Innovate UK Monitoring Officer (MO) satisfied (they are responsible for releasing your grant payments, so you'll need to keep them on-side otherwise they can cause problems for you).

Between being accepted for a grant and the grant start date, there is a period where you need to put together a comprehensive plan for the whole project. This plan contains:

• A detailed project plan outlining all of the key milestones, objectives and deadlines of the project
• A Gantt chart with a timeline of the project
• A risk log listing all of the known risks and mitigations
• A spreadsheet outlining all of the baseline costs
• An exploitation plan describing the commercialisation strategy that follows the R&D

The objectives outlined in the project plan are the most important thing to get right, because not achieving them may result in cash being withheld.

You need to set objectives that are achievable, but that don't look too trivial. Your plans will change as time progresses, so you'll want to set believable objectives that are vague enough that they allow for flexibility in your plans. Spread the objectives out, so that you can show steady progress during your quarterly MO meetings. Make sure that all objectives have a demonstrable way of proving that they are completed i.e. a document, a new product feature or some statistical results.

Objectives can be changed over the course of the project but preferably not significantly. Significant changes may need to be approved by the MO and, if unapproved, could block you from receiving any more cash.

These planning documents all need to be completed before you can sign the contracts for the grant. If your project requires a collaboration, you'll also need to coordinate with the collaborator including setting up an IP agreement. The project cannot start until all of these documents are ready. For instance, we suffered delays of several months to our project due to negotiations with our university collaborator over IP.

How to keep your monitoring officer happy

It's your MO's job to ensure that the Innovate UK cash is being spent wisely and that your company is on course to benefit from the grant. They are happiest when all objectives are being met according to schedule, with evidence to show progress, no surprises in the spending and all documentation is up to date.

An MO is typically a professional from your industry whose been contracted to keep an eye on your project (and others). They have different personalities and may want to see different things, so it's worth making efforts to get to know them at the beginning of the project and ask them up front what they'd like to see from you.

They will meet you quarterly for a 1 to 2 hour meeting where you present your progress. This meeting will usually consist of you reviewing the objectives for that quarter, updating them on the exploitation strategy and risks, answering questions, discussing plans and any changes for the next quarter. Here's the PowerPoint template I used which was well received by our MO.

You'll also need to update all the project documents, which should be sent to the MO in advance of the meeting. You always want to show that progress is being made and that you're learning over the course of the project. For instance, new risks will be discovered, other risks will become irrelevant, objective deadlines will need to be adjusted, market conditions may change, and so on. Help your MO by highlighting and making it clear what's changed in the documents each quarter.

We learned a lot of this by deciding to keep our grant writer on as a management consultant for the project. Their input was perhaps less critical than on the application itself, but nonetheless, for a first-time grant winner they helped us set up good processes that ensured we unlocked the full value of the grant.

But at the end of the day, as long as you are able to make your MO's job easy then they'll make your grant easy.

Tips for managing the grant money so you get the most out of it

Grant funding does not arrive in your business account as a straightforward cash transaction. There are checks, conditions and budgets to deal with first. Getting this wrong can mean not getting the full amount you applied for.

For cash-strapped small businesses, the most important thing to bear in mind is that Innovate UK payments are made in arrears. You will also need to contribute a percentage of the total grant fund (typically 30% for an early stage company). This means that you'll need runway until the end of the grant and some months after if you want to make sure your company is still alive by the time you receive all your payments.

We received our grant payments typically around a month after each quarter ended, but this can be delayed by compulsory, independent audits you need to go through (and organise, and pay for). It also means you won't get 100% of your spend back, so make sure you're happy with your runway being spent this way.

Good budgeting during the intermediary project planning stage is crucial.

One thing we did was to front-load most of our budget to the first two thirds of the project so that we could accrue most of the grant cash before the project ended. However, this meant we had to justify the budget by front-loading most of the work as well, which led to some tight deadlines and self-inflicted pressure.

To plan for this, we worked backwards from the budget to figure out the deadlines for the project objectives. We determined how much cash we wanted in each quarter, calculated how many man hours and resource costs would be required to justify the cash spend and then allocated an appropriate number of objective deadlines to those quarters. Remember that your MO might ask to see evidence of your expenditure during your quarterly meeting (timesheets, invoices etc).

Any budget that isn't used up in a quarter is lost, so try to slightly overspend. It is possible to move the budget between quarters, but this needs to be planned in advanced and approved by the MO. As such, expect to get away with this once or twice at most and ideally in the latter stages of the project where it's more likely to be justified.

As with your project plan, try to be reasonably vague when budgeting resources so that you have some flexibility with how the money ends up being spent i.e. budgeting £1k for software costs vs. £1k for Amazon AWS EC2/S3 etc.

Nonetheless, try to avoid spending for the sake of spending. We found ourselves buying data and software licences in order to meet our budget requirements, inadvertently adding technical debt to maintain and justify those resources after the grant had ended.

Be wary of using the grant to pay for patenting costs. Innovate UK do like to see efforts to protect IP, and the upfront costs are ideal for spending Innovate UK budget on, but the lifetime cost may become a burden to your startup long after the grant has ended.

Also, make sure that any new hires that are to be funded by the grant are ideally recruited before the grant starts. In our grant, we'd allocated budget to a new hire who wasn't able to start until halfway into the project. This meant we could not access the funds set aside for their man-hours until they started, which caused lots of re-budgeting and planning headaches.

Why winning a grant is about more than cash in your bank

Winning a grant isn't just about getting cash in the bank. By being mindful of the other benefits of winning, your business can extract additional value throughout, as well as beyond the lifetime of the project.

At the very least, the grant will enable your business to explore a risky R&D project that either leads to a new product or feature. Or else it won't, but instead will mitigate the risk of learning such a valuable lesson.

You will also build trust with Innovate UK and demonstrate competency in managing a project with them. You'll gain experience in their application process and management style.

You're more likely to be accepted for future grants.

For new businesses, the project will have forced you to think deeply about risks, future development and your business plan. You may have also built a relationship and co-developed IP with a collaborator which can lead to a partnership, investment or future acquisition.

Hopefully you'll have some new hires that continue to contribute to your success. You'll have earned some much-needed runway without losing any precious equity.

And there's a certain prestige that comes with having won a grant. It can be evidence that legitimises your business as being cutting edge to customers and investors. It looks good on a pitch deck and the grant total is often added by founders onto the amount they've raised in order to inflate their perceived value.

Where else you could be looking for equity-free money to help fund your business

Whether it be through Innovate UK or elsewhere, all early businesses need funding and it's best to keep your options open to maximise your chances of attracting it. Here are some of the other small business grants in the UK worth considering:

• Horizon 2020 - The EU's research and innovation programme which has €30b to invest. There are plans for an even more ambitious €100b programme to succeed it beyond 2020, although it's unclear with Brexit whether UK companies will be eligible to apply. With an average grant size of €1.76m, Horizon 2020 grants are typically awarded to larger projects than the projects eligible for Innovate UK.
• Eurostars - Targeted at SMEs doing R&D and funded by Horizon 2020 and other countries worldwide. Funding can be up to €360k.
• R&D Tax Credits - Any R&D SME in the UK should be taking advantage of this scheme, which refunds accrued R&D costs back to the business. While unlikely to be as significant a sum as a grant, it nonetheless can give valuable extra months of runway to a small company.
• Start Up Loans - Government backed loans of up to £25k which are targeted specifically at very early stage companies and come with mentoring and business support.

Will Brexit have an impact on funding?

With Brexit now formally in place, the grant funding landscape should start to become less uncertain. At the moment, small businesses in the UK can still apply for European grants, although it's unclear whether Brexit has had an effect on their success rate. However, UK businesses may become ineligible for future funds.

It's also unclear whether the government will make up for the £850m the EU currently invests into UK R&D. A recent proposal for an £800m DARPA style R&D agency was rejected by the government and no announcements have yet been made on significantly growing Innovate UK's budget. A likely consequence of this is that Innovate UK grants may become even more competitive over the coming years.

Summary

Winning an Innovate UK grant is a prestigious and potentially company-saving endeavour. However, the application process is arduous and the management of the project is not straightforward. Hopefully with this guide you'll be better informed about whether applying for a grant is right for you, and if so you'll be better equipped with handling the application. The Knowledge Transfer Network also have a great guide with more details about the application process.

Much of the advice in this post was gleaned from my own experience applying for and managing a £500k grant. The Innovate UK process does change over time so some of this information may become out of date.

Special thanks to Sarah Thickett, Tim Hanson, Andy O'Harney, Theo Saville, my grant writer and my MO who read this guide and provided helpful comments.

These lessons were all learned the hard way during EF5 where I co-founded Context Scout.

I’m a product manager, entrepreneur, academic, developer and designer, ruminating on AI and the future of the internet. I created a technology called Scout that offers real-time virtual assistance while browsing online. You can see a demo of it in action by visiting my personal website.

To build it I spent 4 years developing, fundraising, hiring, firing, testing and designing. I use this blog to write about what went right and what went wrong, and what I learned from it. So far, I've written about:

• A speculative vision for a conversational web browser that chats to you and assists you while you're online
• A guide for winning an Innovate UK grant
• 8 Tips for Getting Started with Entrepreneur First
• The concept of the web browser acting as a GPS for the web
• Life after the search engine
• My PhD thesis on Dynamic Information Retrieval

The concept sprung from my 5 years of research into dynamic information retrieval at UCL and Microsoft Research, and I started working on it with Andrew O’Harney who I met on Entrepreneur First. You should also check him out too, he’s great.

If you have any questions, or any suggestions for what you'd like to see me write about, please let me know in the comments below.

Our interface to the web has not changed in 20 years. Despite the ubiquity of the internet and recent progress with AI, the web browser is still nothing more than a fairly limited HTML renderer.

Where could it be improved? What else should it do? How should we go about thinking about this?

One place to start is to consider: what does the internet “look” like?

Picture it in your mind.

Think of all of the different websites, social media and news articles there are. Hyperlinks and search results. Images, text and video. All of this connected together in a huge, sprawling, densely-packed mess.

Something like this:

What you’re looking at is a map.

A map where each web domain is a town, each webpage a stopping-off point and each hyperlink a road. Your web browser is your vehicle and your pathway through the web is your journey.

Driving the Internet Superhighway

Many journeys don’t require a map. Your trip to the local shop is straightforward and traversing the web can often be as simple as getting from point A to point B. Our journeys to Facebook, Gmail and Twitter are well rehearsed and we don’t need help getting there.

Other journeys are more complex. Traditionally, we made these journeys by directly pointing our browser at different websites. In the early days of the World Wide Web, there were few enough web domains that most of them could be listed and categorised in directories such as Yahoo!, the web’s very own A-Z.

But we don’t always know where we’re going online.

Sometimes the intended destination is vague and far away. For instance, when you’re doing research or work online, you often aren’t sure which is the best website to view, or the correct search to find it, or even whether you’ve found everything you need to know.

As the internet grew larger, indexing services like Yahoo! became too unwieldy to use. It became easier to simply ask for directions every time you got lost online, which was often.

Google made it so straightforward to ask for directions that it has become the de facto method of navigating the web. Right now, we pick a starting point, ask Google for directions, take a few steps forward, ask Google for directions, and so on. In fact, this is how we spend 20% of our time online, searching. The other 80% is the difficult work of reading, comprehending, piecing information together and coming up with the next set of directions. This makes up the bulk of the 19 hours per week we spend on online tasks.

Navigating by guesswork is overwhelming and unreliable, but we operate in this way because the web is a huge, complicated map that has outgrown its A-Z and there is no alternative. Our interface to the web has reached its limit.

What the web needs is a GPS.

Global Positioning System

The GPS satellite network revolutionised road travel. A device where you simply plug in an address and it shows you how to get there.

But what was truly game-changing about GPS was that it created a dynamic interface for your journey. By breaking your journey down into navigable pieces, you only needed to concentrate on what’s next. By keeping track of your progress, it could let you know how far along you were and adapt in real-time as you made changes. By being connected to other services, it could let you know of upcoming diversions and traffic conditions.

GPS transformed the traditional map, a static topological overview, into a personalised navigational perspective for each driver. It made driving better, safer and more efficient. It created a new interface to the road, one where you could simply get in the car and drive.

Guided Personalised Search — The new information interface

GPS (Guided Personalised Search) will have a similar impact to the way we traverse the web. A new interface offering you a personalised navigational perspective so you can get to your online destination with minimal effort and maximum insight.

Like an in-car GPS, it will allow you to explicitly set a destination in advance, or else infer it from the searches you (and others like you) have made and which websites you’ve been to.

It will make search or website recommendations to you based on which websites you’re on now and where it looks like you’re heading to next. By predicting your next steps, it will pre-emptively source useful information and display it to you, rather than waiting for you to make the journey yourself.

Its interface could be dynamically overlaid onto your current webpage like an Augmented Reality layer for the web. Once you’re done online, you’d have the entire breakdown of all of the steps you took and what you discovered along the way, ready to be used for any purpose.

And where should this service reside? Inside your web browser of course, your vehicle for the web.

A new interface opens the door to automation

In-car GPS has been around for decades and the technology has now been standardised to the point of being a basic feature in every smartphone. Aside from inspiring a new interface for information access, what else can it tell us about the future of the web?

In its current state, GPS now serves as an enabling layer for autonomous vehicles. By abstracting out the navigational part of travel, the only human aspect remaining is the mechanical act of driving itself. The creation and dissemination of GPS was a necessary condition before automation could become a possibility.

It goes without saying that self-driving cars will have a world-changing impact on the likes of travel, workplaces, property, public spaces and so on. What happens when everyone has GPS for the web and we can start to abstract search out of the time we spend online? When information gathering and synthesis is mostly automated and people are shown what’s most relevant to them at that moment. What could we be doing if we didn’t spend all day needing to browse the web? Would we become more productive? Our work more human-focused? How does the structure of the web change when there are primarily AIs consuming it?

Automating work will have a similar impact on the world. But if we are to make meaningful progress in the automation of work, we first need to change our interface to work, to information and to the web.

A Guided Personalised Search service is a Context Scout

I’ve been grappling with these questions for the past 8 years, and finding answers to them in the last 2 and a half with Context Scout. Identifying the parallels with GPS came about naturally and has helped guide our product decision making. We still have a long way to go, but we’ve made progress in understanding the context of where you are online, and scouting ahead to find ways to help.

So far, our in-browser plug-in keeps track of and organises your online web behaviour into task-oriented ‘journeys’. Context Scout will search for new information that’s relevant to your ongoing task and provide helpful links to possible next steps. Once you’re done, we can connect the information you found into your favourite services.

The interface for our current prototype is much like an in-car GPS, it sits to the side so you can glance over and interact with it when you need to. But soon we’ll be adding an augmentation layer that directly overlays semantically relevant information onto webpage content, offering a new perspective onto the web.

Our tech is still in its infancy but is progressing rapidly. It works at a local scale just now, assisting with the navigation of parts of the web rather than the whole. It’s a plug-in into existing web browsers rather than a fully-featured platform in itself. We’re making a head start, but our aim is to be as ubiquitous as GPS and to fundamentally change how everyone accesses information online.

As web journeys become more complicated, asking for directions at every stop no longer works. We’re spending more and more time on the web and collectively losing 28 billion hours due to information overload. Our interface for the 80% of the time we spend manually navigating the web needs an urgent upgrade — a GPS for the web — and with this will come a new perspective, and a pathway to the automation of work.

Search without the search engine, life after Google and an AI in your browser are different ways of saying the same thing. What it comes down to is Context Scout’s core belief that there are enough contextual clues in your online behaviour that information should be seamlessly curated and delivered to you when you need it. This is what we’ve worked on for 2 years and myself personally for over 7 years. In this past year, we had enough resources to finally solve some of the hardest, most crucial problems that stood in our way.

Context Scout spent most of 2017 digging a big hole in the ground, and now we’re building a frame, and fast. But progress is hidden when you’re underground, so here’s what we’re been up to this past year.

What We’ve Built

• A prototype AI that is embedded in your web browser, understands the work you’re doing online and figures out how to help you
• State-of-the-art NLP algorithms that use the latest deep learning research to identify entities on webpages
• An engine that can build task-oriented semantic knowledge graphs in real-time based on web usage

• An infrastructure for automatically connecting a user’s task to any website, API or database through our bespoke (and soon-to-be patented) integration framework
• Hundreds of prototypes and designs in order to find the most intuitive and helpful way to assist users using this powerful engine
• An almost-ready MVP that is currently able to assist recruiters and investors by summarising key facts on webpages, automatically finding new facts about people and companies from the web and saving this information to a database or CRM

How is it Being Used

• Just now, we have beta testers from 3 countries using our prototype. They interact with the tool on average 7.08 times a day (and rising)

• We’ve extracted 240000 entities and 294000 relations from 16000 webpages across 11500 distinct workflows
• With this unique dataset we’ve been able to begin research on extracting usage characteristics that will personalise each user’s individual experience
• Our users can already connect Context Scout to 10 services: Google Sheets and Calendar, Beamery, Thomson Reuters, GitHub, Lusha, Workable, StackOverflow, Wikipedia and FullContact

What We Achieved

• We were awarded a £500k Innovate UK grant (as part of the UK government’s strategic investment into robotics and AI) in collaboration with UCL (the UK’s highest ranked Computer Science department) to continue our research into online workflow assistance
• We were selected by the UK Department of International Trade (DIT) to represent the UK on a Trade Mission to TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, as well as presenting our technology at the Grace Hopper and Web Search and Data Mining Conferences
• We submitted 3 patent applications
• Published our first research paper and open source code

Team Context Scout

• We’ve grown into a team of 6, our newest members are Emily, our product designer who joins us from the Cortana team at Microsoft, and Chris, our full-stack engineer, founder of 3 companies and alumni from both EF and YC
• We’ll soon be joined by Mohammad who’ll be working for UCL as a post-doc in collaboration with us on our grant project, and we’re currently looking for a lead engineer

What We’ll be Doing in 2018

• Onboarding new testers onto our prototype each week, we currently have 1700 more lined up
• Publicly re-launching our product back into the recruitment market
• New features in the pipeline including on-webpage UI and interactions, task management and contextual auto-suggest
• Also launching our enterprise workflow analytics toolkit into a pilot program with some of the 25+ enterprises we’ve engaged with in the past year
• More patents, papers and publications
• We are likely to be fundraising by the end of the year, there’ll be more news on this as the year progresses

***

Our mission at Context Scout is to build what comes after search. The foundations are now in place, the scaffolding has gone up and the frame is under construction. In 2018, you’ll be hearing a lot more from us as we expand our userbase and publicly release our technology. We’ll be making some big announcements over the next couple of months — until then, Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year!

You’ve probably used one of these today

For most of us, the search box is the entry-point to the web and a vital conduit for information access and retrieval.

But can you remember the last time it had a noticeable upgrade? For all of the growing hype around AI and advances in machine learning, we don’t often hear how these technologies are going to impact on search. It would be fair to wonder if there is indeed anywhere for search to go, whether we’ve reached ‘peak’ search capability.

I believe that web search is going to change, and in a big way. But it won’t look or feel like the familiar search box, and neither will it be a voice interface or chatbot. To understand where search is headed, it helps to understand where we are just now.

The Modern Search Engine

Google has defined web search over the past two decades. Their UI is universally familiar and perfectly optimised. A search field for typing natural language, a button that begins the search, results presented as a list of 10 blue links, each with a summary. We’ve seen new additions such as targeted verticals for images and shopping, the knowledge box for information on entities from Google’s knowledge graph, and of course, sponsored listings. But otherwise, not much has dramatically changed over the past 10 years or so.

The major changes have occurred under the hood. Google diminished PageRank’s contribution long ago and there has been a huge amount of machine learning research applied to making search better such as learning to rank, user behaviour models, personalisation, and, of course, deep learning. All of this in pursuit of better search rankings.

Extensive resources have been poured into perfecting the list of search results, ensuring that those 10 links are the best they can be. Each advance slightly improves well-worn metric scores such as nDCG and MAP, measured on standardised data sets such as those published by TREC and Google’s vast search logs. Yet on the surface, these marginal gains are scarcely noticeable.

I believe that we’ve taken the search results page to its limit. For its intended purpose of being a destination whereupon you trade words for the starting point of an online journey, the current UX and technology works extremely well. It’s familiar, dependable and now a core part of the infrastructure of the web, as vital as the Back button, the URL bar and the hyperlink.

Is Voice the Future of Search?

Many believe that the successor to search already exists and it’s called Alexa. For me, voice assistants are simply a solution to a new problem caused by the fact that the way many people now access the web is changing. Last year, mobile access to the internet surpassed desktop usage for the first time. People are accessing information from their sofas, in restaurants and while they’re on the move. And with this their requirements for search have also changed.

Searching using a mobile is not a great experience. The highly successful desktop search conventions have been shoe-horned onto a device for which they aren’t well designed. It’s difficult to type keywords using your fingers on a screen with one hand, then deal with the slowdown on auto-suggest caused by intermittent data connections only to land on a results page that is still a wall of text with small links.

Therefore, it is only natural that we are now exploring interfaces incorporating speaking and text messaging as modes of interaction. The growing list of voice and chatbot assistants attests to the progress that’s been made, and therefore we arrive at spin-off devices such as Amazon’s Alexa that are enabled by these new hands-free interfaces. Gone are the lists of search results, replaced instead with spoken responses or chatbot comments. Gone are the ad hoc 2 to 3 word queries, replaced instead by questions and commands.

Yet, despite the enormous strides in speech recognition that power this new interface, our usage is still limited to the sort of short, simple queries we would use in a search engine. We aren’t having conversations with our devices yet and we won’t be for some time. This creates as many problems as it solves: verbalising commands slows down the information finding process and alters your train of thought, it’s awkward to use in public or at a desk, and any kind of in-depth information finding becomes tiring and confusing.

Voice is an essential UX upgrade catering to an emerging medium for information access, but it’s still search within the box. So if voice isn’t web search’s next great leap forward, then where else can it go? I believe that there are two interrelated areas for improvement that will be critical to revolutionising web search.

Context

What is context and what does it have to do with search? Context is everything that exists outside of the words you put into the search box. It’s the location you’re standing in, the time of day and where you just ate lunch. It’s the 5 searches you’ve made in the last hour, the email you read and the conversation you’re currently having on Slack. It exists in the spaces between the words you use to describe your intent.

The greatest difficulty in optimising the modern search engine is that there is only so much understanding you can derive from the 2.4 words that the average user enters into the search box. This is one of the reasons why Google use cookies to track your behaviour across the web to learn your preferences and habits (and to advertise to you, of course). Each of us has a Google feature vector describing our hobbies, our demographics and our purchase history. When you search for something ambiguous like “eagles”, your preference for classic rock may net you different results than your ornithologist neighbour.

This is a form of context in aggregate that has had success in traditional search, but it’s limited in that it can only tell you so much about why a search was made at that moment in time. Context evolves. Context encapsulates every action you took before you searched and it influences everything that’s likely to happen next.

The huge problem just now is that you are the arbiter of your context. As you do things online, you have to personally remember everything you’re discovering, connect the dots as you go along and figure out what to search for next. You retain all of your own context, which makes the meaning of your search query seem obvious to you but obscure to the tools you’re using. Web search cannot advance until this problem is solved.

Tasks

Everything you do online is a task, both at work and at home, even your visits to Facebook. From the broader perspective of your ongoing task, a web search is simply a discrete unit of work that sits alongside other units such as reading, comprehension, data collection, creativity, learning, decision-making and action-taking.

Context is the language of tasks. Using current technology, the completion of a task involves a process of mental context management; finding and remembering information, piecing it together and making conclusions. Tasks materialise and become clearer as context is collected, and once a critical mass has been reached then actions become enabled.

The limitation of the modern search engine is that your task starts with your search query and ends with a click. Features such as query suggestion do acknowledge that you may wish to return to the search results page, but ultimately, once you’ve clicked one of those blue links, you’re on your own.

The Future of Search

Web search’s progress has stalled because the modern search engine doesn’t understand you or what you’re doing. It’s great at one-shot queries and questions but it can’t help you beyond that, not until it can deal with the task you’re trying to complete, and the context in which that task exists. For search to move forward, it needs to expand beyond simply being a transaction where you trade words for a list of search results. It’s no longer about giving you 10 million different starting points, but rather, helping you get to the end of an information journey.

It is a dialogue between you and your search system, comprised of the actions you’re taking and the actions your search system is making alongside you. As you do things online, your search tool should be a cooperative ally understanding the content of what you’re looking at, gradually piecing it together to build up a contextual picture for you.

The search system of the future won’t be a search box but will instead be the platform in which you do things. It will no longer really be seen as ‘web search’, this aspect of it will be relegated to the background and offered as one among many of its services, which will include other technologies such as voice UI and email generation. In fact, these services are likely to be interchangeable and offered by specialist 3rd parties. This platform could be described as a work companion or apprentice, working alongside you to help you do things and always learning how to be better.

Right now, it’s difficult to imagine the functionality of this new search paradigm given that the technology or its UX doesn’t currently exist. However, considering that the primary tool for information access just now is the web browser, I can imagine it will at first take the form of a sort-of smart AI-enabled browser. One that doesn’t just dumbly render HTML, but rather understands webpages and how they fit together, thus building up the essential user context. Task assistance will come in the form of webpage augmentations and automated synchronisation with other applications, one-click buttons that take your context and do meaningful things with it. Search will be one automated service among many.

However, the search engine won’t disappear. It’s still perfectly designed for being a starting point destination, or else a last resort for those tricky one-off tasks your smart browser can’t handle yet. These are the same reasons we use search engines now and this won’t change. Instead, the tools of tomorrow are going to understand what we’re doing outside of the search box, and more importantly, why.

A Comment on Automation

Consider a future where this search platform does exist, where everyone has a personal context “cloud” that plugs into all of their services and helps them with everything. The more the platform is used, the better it gets at predicting that user’s particular tasks and offering them assistance. Consider what it can begin to learn about how to do tasks in general, how to deduce new solutions having seen similar tasks performed millions of times already. Almost like a new kind of PageRank, where the aggregation of connected human actions (akin to user-curated hyperlinks) helps teach systems how to do work.

Knowledge automation is the endgame for search, and task and contextual understanding is the next step there, perhaps even the key to unlocking it.

And with that, Microsoft announced once of the most important acquisitions in their history, made even more remarkable by the fact that it’s been kept quiet for what undoubtedly must have been many months. A revelation that still has those in business and tech wrapping their brains around the potential implications. But what impact will this have on the billions of us who use Microsoft products as part of our everyday working lives?

To begin to address this, you first need to appreciate that this is likely the largest merger of information in history. On Microsoft’s side you’ve got data from Office, Windows, Sharepoint, Dynamics, Exchange, Bing, XBox, Skype and so on. Now add to that the world’s largest professional social network, 18 million presentations on Slideshare, 4600 online courses from Lynda and who can forget the treasure trove of aggregated social information acquired along with Connectifier a few short months ago (which in hindsight looks somewhat strategic). Combined, you end up with one of the most valuable data collections in the world (although untangling all of the legal and privacy issues will prove to be an interesting challenge).

Nonetheless, the intended use of this data is clear. In Satya Nadella’s memo to staff yesterday he described his goal to “reinvent productivity and business processes”. This will be achieved by allowing this data to start bleeding into Microsoft products and services, for instance, he described users “walking into a meeting and getting a snapshot of each person in the meeting based on their LinkedIn profile”. Expect other social integrations into Outlook, Skype and Edge, with SlideShare no doubt incorporated into Office 365 and Lynda courses used as a corporate training tool. Conversely, your Microsoft digital footprint will be used to create “a LinkedIn newsfeed that serves up articles based on the project you are working on”.

In my opinion, the two technologies that will be impacted the most are Microsoft Dynamics and Cortana. With the former, Microsoft are strengthening their position against the likes of Salesforce. On the other hand, Cortana will be Microsoft’s contender against the ever-increasing myriad of chatbots and AI assistants (including Google’s Allo and Siri-like Viv), except now privy to your professional network along with your Bing searches and use of Office 365.

“In essence, we can reinvent ways to make professionals more productive”

All of this leads to a better connected, more useful suite of professional tools. Each stage in your Microsoft-centric workflow will be enhanced by useful data that helps you achieve your goals more efficiently. With this acquisition, Microsoft are showing that the future of productivity looks like an integration of professional solutions that consume data from multiple sources.

Which is hugely exciting to me and my team at Context Scout. Microsoft’s move in this direction is affirmation of the mission of the company, to augment the workflows of professionals by automatically searching for information from the web that helps them complete their tasks. Except unlike Microsoft, we intend to be more like a web search service by making use of any information available online.

For instance, consider the workflow of a technical recruiter or hiring manager, for whom the sourcing of high quality information about a job candidate is considered a trade skill. Sure, LinkedIn is a great starting point, but professionals know that they need to use Twitter to learn about a candidate’s interests, GitHub and StackOverflow to get some validation of skills, Glassdoor to estimate an expected salary, and all of the Boolean search tricks needed to find this information. And where is this information most useful? Back on the original LinkedIn page of course.

The Context Scout Chrome extension has already automated the described workflow. By injecting relevant information from different sources on the web onto the platform on which a task is being performed, productivity increases. Ours is a bottom-up approach, we intend to grow by task, then by sector and finally by personalising to each individual professional. Through our API service (now publicly available, contact us to find out more), integration will occur on whatever platform makes most sense for the task: webpage augmentation via the Chrome extension, a Slack-bot, email plug-in and so on. We will learn from our users which workflows work and which don’t. We’ll connect to any source of information, whether freely available on the web, or in partnership with closed sources.

We recognise that we’re moving to a web where information is increasingly available via API and can move freely from service to service. Where search occurs in the background while you get on with your task and results are communicated through natural language or whatever form is appropriate. Any visit to a search engine will be a failure on the part of your productivity assistant to find the right information for you in advance. Those 10 blue links will increasingly remain blue.

This acquisition heralds Microsoft’s first steps into cross-platform, data-driven tooling, the future of productivity and the future work environment. We at Context Scout believe that along this path also lies the future of search.

Context Scout is a Chrome extension that enhances the LinkedIn profiles of technical job candidates by searching the web for extra information about them. It can find personal blogs and links to social profiles such as Twitter and Facebook. It also validates a candidate’s skills by connecting them to technical profiles like GitHub and StackOverflow, as well as finding undeclared skills. On top of this, it can determine someone’s general interests based on their tweets or blog posts. It’s a personal assistant that helps you figure out if a candidate is right for a role.

Now that the sales pitch is out of the way, let me tell you about how me and my co-founder Andy got here and the effect IAESTE has had on our lives. That’s me on the left in Switzerland on an IAESTE placement in 2010, and likewise on the right is Andy in Brazil in 2012 (the disgruntled looking Scotsman, not the tall guy or the giant statue). Both summers were hugely influential, great fun and the precursor to more international work placements for both of us in places like Malawi, Seattle and South Carolina. Definitely a case of Work. Experience. Discover.

Following my placement, I moved to London and spent the next 4 years involved with the London LC while I did my PhD, a year of which I spent as its president.

Running the London LC gave me the preparation I needed to build Context Scout. Leading a team of volunteers is not all that different from leading my company, except now I pay wages with cash instead of pizza and beer. Many of the tips and tricks I use in marketing and selling Context Scout I got while selling IAESTE to companies, universities and students in London. And balancing the LC budget and managing its activities was very much like practicing how to run a very small business.

It also introduced me to the problems encountered during technical hiring. I’ve helped countless science and engineering students make their IAESTE applications stand out. I’ve also gained insight into IAESTE’s selection procedures and the difficulty in assessing candidate fit, both technical and personal. This unique experience, married with my PhD work on contextual web search, led to me creating Context Scout.

Context Scout is an essential tool for the upcoming candidate assessment period. The tool helps make CV’s on LinkedIn stand out by finding supporting information that the candidate didn’t think to include. It validates the information that is already there and can help highlight the good profiles when many of them look the same. And with IAESTE it’s never just about technical skills, so Context Scout can also help you figure out a person’s interests including travel and culture.

Context Scout is already being used by professional recruiters and hiring managers all over the world and we’re growing every day. IAESTE has already given me and Andy so much and this is our chance to give a little back. Our definition of success will be the day that we can take on our own IAESTE summer intern! So give the tool a try by visiting Context Scout, or installing it directly from the Chrome Market. I’d also love to hear what you think, so get in touch :)