Work / Investigative visualization
StoryChron
A proposed tool that reads a finished due-diligence memo, pulls out every date, and turns it into an interactive timeline.
Clients were telling the firm’s partners that our main work product was too dense. A memo written in Word and delivered as a PDF made people work hard to find what they needed.
We proposed a tool that would take a finished memo, find every date in it, and plot the events on a timeline. You’d see the shape of someone’s history before reading a word.
The problem
- Internal resistance to changing a deliverable clients were used to.
- Parsing depended on the memo’s structure, which wasn’t always consistent.
- Getting clean text and structure out of Word documents programmatically.
A design problem inside it
Much of the firm’s value was checking what a subject claimed: on a résumé, in an interview. The timeline had to show the claim and the verification side by side. I used an open circle for what the subject said and a solid circle on the same line for what we confirmed.
Where it ended up
I built the prototype from Figma exports to SVG, with interaction added in JavaScript. It stayed a prototype. Named-entity extraction and summarizing would be far easier with today’s language models, and it’s an idea I’d still like to see built.