Paperpal
The AI writing assistant that brings out the best in academic authors — from first idea to final draft
- Role
- Lead Product Designer, Cactus Communications
- Year
- 2023
- Client
- Cactus Communications
- product design
- design systems
- user research
- SaaS
- web
As Lead Product Designer at Cactus Communications, I shaped Paperpal, an AI academic writing assistant now used by 5M+ academics across 125+ countries. The core challenge: let AI live inside a critical writing surface, suggesting and rewriting, without ever breaking the author's trust.
01
My role
- Product Design
- UX Design
- Design Systems
- User Research
02
The problem
Academic authors write under unusually high stakes: a single sentence carries years of research and reputation, and most are writing in a second language for the unforgiving conventions of peer review. AI promises to help them write faster and cleaner, but dropping a generative model into a manuscript is dangerous — over-eager suggestions flatten meaning, invented references end careers, and any sense that the machine is rewriting the author's voice destroys trust instantly. The product had to make AI feel like a careful editor sitting beside the author, not an autocomplete hijacking their argument.
03
The process
As Lead Product Designer at Cactus Communications, I led design for Paperpal as it grew from a focused language assistant into an all-in-one academic writing platform spanning grammar and language, AI writing, research and citation across 250M+ articles and 10,000+ styles, Chat PDF, plagiarism and AI detection, and rewriting. The guiding principle was suggestion over substitution: AI lives inline as reviewable, dismissible recommendations the author always approves, with edits scoped tightly so the writer's voice survives. I shaped a consistent system across the surfaces academics actually work in — the web editor plus MS Word, Google Docs and Chrome plugins — so the experience felt the same whether someone started from a blank document or an existing manuscript, and ran user research with academic authors to keep the suggestions trustworthy rather than merely impressive.
04
The outcome
Paperpal scaled into one of the most widely used academic writing tools in the world: 5M+ academics across 125+ countries, more than 10B words of academic text perfected, trusted around 1,500+ journals, and built on 24+ years of academic publishing experience. By treating trust as the core design constraint — every suggestion reviewable, the author always in control — the product earned a place inside the high-stakes writing surface where most authors would never tolerate an AI getting it wrong.
- 5M+ academics across 125+ countries
- 10B+ words of academic text perfected
- Research across 250M+ articles, citations in 10,000+ styles
- Lives in the web editor plus Word, Google Docs & Chrome