Best Practices

How to work well in Normain: using the chat, framing your prompts, reusing your best setups, choosing the right view, and keeping your work organised.

This chapter is about how to work well in Normain: the habits that get the most out of it. Each topic has a deeper how-to in its own chapter, linked at the end of the section. Here we focus on why it matters and how to use it well.

Use the chat

The chat is the fastest way to get almost anything done in Normain, so reach for it before setting things up by hand. You describe what you want in plain language and it builds it: a whole project from a description, a Notebook laid out as steps from your method, a document turned into insight cards, a large spreadsheet with one row per question, or a change across an Extraction you have already run. If you can describe it, the chat can usually build it.

See Using the chat for the full picture.

Set the frame with a global prompt

Set a global prompt on almost every Extraction. It fixes the scope and context once, so every answer comes back the way you intend instead of each question drifting on its own. In one instruction you can set:

• the scope and context, so Normain knows which documents to use and what to assume;
• what to prioritise or ignore;
• a default format or language for every answer;
• your own terminology and tone.

See Adding sources and insights for how to write one, with examples.

Choose the right view

Pick the view that fits the job. When working in a Simple Extraction, choosing the right one makes your results far easier to review, so you spend your time checking the work rather than fighting the layout.

• Card view - for reading results in a document-style layout and for analysing or comparing a set of documents together.
• Table view - for working with many insights at once and for Repeat mode across many files or folders.

See Validating your results for how each view works.

Filter before you review

Before you start reviewing, narrow the results to what matters. Filtering keeps your attention on the answers that need it and hides the rest. You can filter by:

• Assignment - show the insights assigned to you, or to a particular reviewer.
• Status - focus on what is still to review, or on what has been marked correct or incorrect.
• Comments - surface the insights that have a comment or a question on them.
• Confidence score - bring the lower-confidence answers to the top to check first.
• Label - put any label on an insight, then filter the project down to just the ones with that label, for example one to check again or a question for the client.

See Validating your results for filtering and labels.

Work in passes

Before running a large job, run a small slice first. It saves time and credits, and shows you whether the setup is right before you commit to the whole thing. Run one insight on one file or one step in a Notebook, check the wording and the result, then run the rest. You can re-run freely, since Normain keeps every earlier answer, so nothing is lost.

See Adding sources and insights for running part of an Extraction, and Validating your results for version history.

Configure your own dashboard

Once your team runs work regularly, a dashboard gives you a live read on it. Each team builds its own, with charts that count and summarise the answers across all of its projects.

• Build it by hand on a grid, or just describe what you want and the chat lays it out for you.
• Pick the charts that fit the question: bar and donut charts, trend lines, and tables.
• Chart a value over a date the analysis itself found, lining up a figure like spend per month on the real dates, not the day you imported the files.
• Every widget shows the period it covers, and results roll up into summary statistics instead of being counted by hand.

Team owners set it up and everyone on the team can view it. Owners also get an organisation-wide view of what is being run, by which teams, and what it is consuming.

Organise your projects as you grow

As your firm runs more projects, a little structure keeps work easy to find and hand over. The projects page in the sidebar is your home for everything you run.

• Group projects into folders for a client, engagement, or team, and nest folders to mirror a structure you already use. A project lives in one folder at a time; moving it only changes where it sits, not its sources, results, or who can access it.
• Find recent work from the recently visited row at the top of the page.
• Switch between tree view, which expands your folders like a file explorer, and a compact view, which shows one folder at a time for a quick scan.
• Archive projects you have finished so active work stays in front of you. Nothing is deleted, and you can find an archived project again whenever you need it.

See Creating a project for more on the projects page.

Collaborate and review as a team

Reviews go faster when the right people are looped in at the right moment, and nothing slips because it sat on one person’s screen.

• Assign an insight for review to a colleague, and @-mention teammates in a comment to pull them in.
• Turn on notifications so you are alerted when someone tags you or assigns you work.
• Use the comments panel to see every comment across a project in one place.

See Validating your results for comments and review.

Reuse and scale your best work

The biggest gains in Normain come from reusing work instead of rebuilding it. Your best expert sets a piece of work up well once, and the whole team runs to that standard. You can reuse at a few levels:

• Save a project, whether an Extraction or a Notebook, as a template to start new work from, or turn a finished Workflow into a publication that others run as a simple app.
• Duplicate a project to make a quick copy you can tweak, without saving a reusable template.
• Keep your best prompts as snippets and your common sources in the data sources library, so everyone writes from the same wording and works from the same references.

See Templates and Publications for templates and publications, and Adding sources and insights for the libraries.