What NOVA is
NOVA is a design tool for the Human-Centred Agentic Intelligence (HAI)
framework. Instead of designing UI flows in isolation, you map three
perspectives in parallel: what the human is trying to achieve,
how the agent reasons and acts, and what the system
enables underneath. The output is a Markdown spec you can hand off to
any AI model or engineering team.
Projects, journeys, steps
A project is a product or feature. A project contains
one or more journeys — use multiple journeys to cover
different user segments, edge-cases, or alternative flows. Each journey
is a sequence of steps (or stages in
customer-journey mode). Each step has 22 dimensions split across the
three layers.
Two views, same data
Graph
Card-based flow view. Best for high-level design — adding or reordering steps,
seeing the journey's shape, reviewing a few dimensions at a time.
Matrix
Spreadsheet view with dimensions as rows and steps as columns. Best
for bulk editing across many steps at once, or comparing one dimension
across the whole journey.
Editing
- Click a card (body area) to open the step drawer and edit all 22 dimensions.
- Drag a card's header to reorder steps. The body stays clickable for the drawer.
- The kebab menu (three-dot icon on each card / column) has Duplicate and Delete.
- Double-click a journey tab to rename it inline.
- Matrix columns are also draggable, with the same kebab menu.
Export to Markdown
The Export button produces a .md file that's both
readable documentation and machine-parseable structured input. Give it to
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or a build team as a canonical spec to implement
the product. Multi-journey projects open a picker so you choose which
journeys to include.
Keyboard shortcuts
- Esc
- Close the current drawer, overlay, or menu
- Enter
- Commit an inline rename (journey tab, step title)
- → / ←
- Next / Previous step in the onboarding tour