Chapter 11
Every screen, part by part
The chapters before this one are about doing things — build a list, run research, write to somebody. This one is about reading things. One page per screen, a numbered screenshot, and a line for every control on it: what it is, what it does, and when you would touch it.
Use it the way you would use a map. If you are on a screen and something on it is unexplained — a column you don't recognise, a badge whose colour you can't read, a button you are not sure is safe to press — find that screen below and the number will be there.
| Screen | What you go there to do |
|---|---|
| The dashboard | Find the one next thing worth doing |
| Universities | See every institution and how far each has got |
| The professors list | Find people, and read their state at a glance |
| A professor's page | Everything known about one person |
| Batches | See what research runs next, and start it |
| Review | Decide what goes on the record |
| Your profile | The material every match and draft is built from |
| Tracking | Conversations, applications, and everything with a date |
| Analytics | Ask questions of your own numbers |
| Settings | Limits, permissions, models, writing rules |
11.1 Things that are true on every screen#
A few conventions repeat everywhere, and knowing them saves reading them eight times.
The sidebar is grouped by what the thing is for. Overview is where you look at numbers. Research is where the raw material lives. Pipeline is where things move. Workspace is your own material and configuration.
⌘K, or Ctrl+K, opens search from anywhere. It searches universities and professors by name, jumps to any page, and searches this guide. Arrow keys to move, Enter to open, Escape to close.
A dash means "nothing recorded", not "zero". Every table uses — for a value that has
never been established, and a real number for a value that is genuinely zero. The
difference matters: nobody has looked is not the same as we looked and found none.
Rates come with their denominator. Where a screen shows a percentage it shows what it is a percentage of, and where the sample is too small to mean anything it says so instead of printing a confident-looking number.
Nothing is ever deleted by research. Findings that fail a check are kept and flagged, conflicts are recorded rather than resolved, and anything you typed yourself is never overwritten by an agent. When a screen looks like it is hiding something, it is usually Review.
A note on the screenshots#
Real professors' surnames are blurred in every screenshot in this chapter, along with the account address in the top bar and the personal fields on the profile screen. Everything else — counts, columns, states, the shape of every screen — is exactly what the app shows.