Imagine there's a new tool that can automatically help you with many use cases.

It's a separate service that you must go to visit.

Whether it is useful in a given situation is tied to whether it has the relevant data imported, and whether it has the intelligence and ability to do something useful with it.

When it's not yet a recurring part of the user's normal flow, there's an activation problem.

False negative: The user thinks the tool won't be useful for a given use case and doesn't bother to check it out… but it actually would have been useful.

False positive: The user thinks the tool will be useful, and goes to visit it… but it doesn't work. In the future they'll now go visit it less often, because their priors for how likely it is to work have eroded.

The amount of erosion is correlated with the amount of effort it took to go look at the tool only to be disappointed.

One way to mitigate this activation problem is a browser extension that can show a badge or sidebar adjacent to other sites.

The extension can flag when it can do something useful proactively, even if the user hasn't realized.

It can also make it more clear when the tool won't be useful: the user can tell by quickly glancing at the badge, not having to waste time navigating to the tool.

This has a lower amount of cost, so the priors for usefulness erode less quickly.

The tool could manifest as a sidebar. The width of that sidebar–the proportion of the screen it takes up vs other content–could grow as the tool grows in ability and usefulness.

Another benefit: the extension can peek over the origin wall and help slurp in other data from other origins for the user.