People found ways to work around this, though each approach brought new challenges:
Exporting chats to external tools, or using browser extensions
which fragments the experience and takes users out of ChatGPT
Renaming chats to stay organized
but this often causes confusion and disrupts the natural order
Searching for past messages
but only returns users to the start of a chat, forcing them to scroll manually to find what they need.
Using Projects (for paid users)
allow grouping new chats, but do not support organizing existing conversations, leaving much of the chat history still unmanageable.
Many Chat GPT users struggle to manage chat history as it lacks robust chat organization feature
Despite serving over 400 million weekly users as of May 2025, ChatGPT still lacks robust features for organizing chat history. This makes it difficult for users to manage, revisit, or make sense of past conversations.
Conversations quickly become disconnected and difficult to track, especially as chat history grows.
Making Past Conversations Easy to Find in ChatGPT
A UX case study exploring the pain points behind ChatGPT’s endless scrolling chats and exploring how color-labeled projects, more visible features, and smart categorizing helped users need for clarity, continuity, and effortless organization.
Background
I collaborated with a team of 2 product designers to improve the user experience of managing chat GPT histories
My Role
Product Designer
User research and User interface design
Team
2 UX/UI Designers + Mentor
Timeline
May - July 2025
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Meet
Interview with users validated the challenging chat history management
We held nine online interviews to learn about users’ goals, habits, and challenges when using ChatGPT for personal and work tasks.
Some features are not visible
The hidden search bar and unclear project feature are often missed by users.
This leads to confusion, clutter, and difficulty handling complex tasks.
“I didn’t know there was a search bar”
There is no filtering
The search bar misses chats, so users scroll endlessly or start new ones.
Adding filters, date groups, and summaries would help.
“wish I could filter or sort by date, scrolling takes forever.”
TBD
Users sometimes want a fresh start or to turn off history.
Without easy controls, they get confused or see irrelevant replies.
Clear privacy settings and simple history toggles would let them choose what ChatGPT remembers or forgets.
“I just wanted to start fresh, but it kept bringing up old stuff.”
it is difficult to find previous chats
Users rename chats and create projects but still struggle to find old ones.
Auto titles are often inaccurate or repetitive.
Letting users pin chats, use folders, or add tags would help.
“I renamed it, but I still can’t find it later.”
Meet the users who shaped our solutions
Olivia, a software developer, starts a new coding project.
She likes to keep every thing organized so she separate chats for each task and rename them
Few days later she revisit her chats to
find a useful response
She decide to search but she can’t remember the keyword at first
After trying different keywords she found the chat but now she has to scroll through her long conversation to find the desired response
Sam the Sprinter
The Scroll Begins
He opens ChatGPT, thinking he’ll find the chat in seconds.
The Scroll Begins
He opens ChatGPT, thinking he’ll find the chat in seconds.
What can we learn from our competitors?
Using visual cues to scan chats faster
Other tools use emojis, tags and visual indicators that make it much easier and faster to scan through projects and chats, while ChatGPT's interface feels plain and harder to navigate.
Save projects with descriptions & custom instructions
ChatGPT lacks proper workspace setup. Competitors allow users to save projects with descriptions and add custom instructions for each project to maintain consistency
Leveraging features for better chat search
Users struggle to find specific information in their conversations. Other tools let users jump directly to searched words, highlight keywords.
Pin & Bookmark chats for easy access
Other tools let users pin, favorite, or bookmark chats and conversations, making it easy to save and revisit important conversations later.
Tags for easier scanning
Highlights keywords to make search easier
Pin/Add to favorite
Olivia
Sam
Olivia the Organizer
Software developer
Olivia uses ChatGPT for focused projects—coding, her weight-loss journey, and other personal goals. To stay organized, she takes advantage of every available feature like carefully naming each chat. Olivia compares tools and approaches to get accurate results, and she uses keyword search instead of scrolling through long histories. She values control, clarity, and efficiency.
Pain points:
The search feature often shows the start of the chat, so they have to scroll to find what they need
Auto-titles make searching harder since she has to recall exact keywords
Even when she renames chats, it’s still hard to find them later
There’s no way to organize chats with folders, subfolders, or tags in ChatGPT
She can’t search within a project, making it hard to find a specific chat or part of a conversation.
Sam the Sprinter
College student
Sam uses ChatGPT for quick tasks like fact-checking, generating images, or summarizing articles. He typically starts a new chat for each question and scrolls through his history to find previous conversations. If he can’t find what he’s looking for, he simply starts a new one. Sam doesn’t use any organization features, he just wants the experience to be fast and effortless.
Pain points:
He doesn’t notice features like search, project, archive, or rename
He scrolls a lot to find old chats since there’s no way to filter or organize by date or topic.
What the Data Told Us to Build First
Backed by user insights and prioritization scores,
these solutions offer the highest impact with feasible effort.
Low Effort
High Effort
High Impact
Low Impact
Pin the Favorite chats
or having an space for favorite chats
Highlight the searched keyword within each chat
When a keyword is searched, land users on the first time that keyword has been mentioned
Redesign the search bar to make it more visible and accessible by increasing its size, adding a contrasting background color, and positioning it at the top of the screen.
AI Generated description for each chat or projects so user can see descriptions to find chat easier and quicker
Mostly For Sam
Add automatic chat clustering where AI refines categories over time based on user feedback.
Having Folders and sub folders for organizing chats and projects
Disposable Chats
for quick questions that don’t need saving
Filter/sort features for chat history
Search bar within a single chat
In-Project Search: Create a search function that allows user to search within a specific project’s chats
When starting a new chat, show them some subjects of their previous chats and ask if they wanna chat about one of those subjects to group their chats in one place (a folder).
Conversational search
A bot that users talk to and find the related chat or dialouge
Instead of using search bar, users use ChatGPT voice mode and explain what they are looking for
Being able to highlight different parts of each chat, and adding it to the notes (having a note section)
Use a creative search bar ( that user can explain what was the content and ChatGPT can search through content of chats)
Adding more control over each chat history.
Using /not using the content of each chat in other conversations.
Adding more details for project setup like description and customized instruction to make project usage more valuable
Use templates for different subject like research, school, travel, etc
When naming a new chat, if the name was similar to an old chat, asking the user if they want to continue the old one.
Provide guided tour for users to educate them more about hidden functionalities like search and projects
Adding icons or emojis to generated titles to improve their find ability
Walking in our users’ Shoes: Why Both the Organized Planner and the Quick Sprinter End Up Lost in ChatGPT
Olivia the Organizer