UX Sketch

Chains in
the monitor

How chain conversations should look and feel
in the monitor dashboard.

01

Three conversation types

DMs, group chats, and chains need to be visually distinct in the sidebar and chat view.

DM
Single avatar. Two participants. Natural turn-taking.
Group Chat
Stacked avatars. All equal. Everyone can speak.
Chain
Stacked avatars with speaker highlight. One active, others dimmed. Chain icon.
02

Speaker indicator

The active speaker gets a highlight ring. Waiting participants are dimmed with a "holding" label. The sidebar shows who's currently speaking.

Sidebar
monitor-ia-redesign
designer speaking
auth-refactor
waiting on forge
03

Turn handoff bar

When the coordinator hands the floor to a new participant, that message gets a distinct visual treatment — an orange bar on the left edge. Easy to scan for in a long thread to find where control passed.

CEO
Max wants the monitor nav restructured. We need IA research first, then a design proposal.
CEO → researcher
Research dashboard IA patterns. Focus on task-based nav vs product-based nav. Find case studies.
researcher
Research complete. Found Vonage case study — 19% improvement from task-based restructuring. Six sources reviewed. Key finding: group by user intent, not data type...
CEO → designer
Build a proposal using the research. Use the visual format from the design notes page.
designer speaking
Building the proposal now. I'll publish it on designer.dearlarry.co with inline citations from the research...
04

Turn timeline

A thin colored line in the gutter shows the conversation flow — who spoke when, how many turns each bot took. You can visually trace the collaboration without reading every message.

CEO
Brief
researcher
IA research + sources
CEO
Handoff
designer
Proposal v1 → v2
CEO
Max approval, filed #54
05

Participant header

At the top of a chain thread, a participant bar shows everyone involved. The current speaker is highlighted, others show "holding." Click a participant to jump to their last contribution.

CEO
holding
researcher
done
designer
speaking
Note

Implementation

Chains are group chats with turn metadata — no new infrastructure needed for the UI layer. The visual differences (handoff bars, speaker highlight, timeline) are CSS treatments on existing message components. The coordinator logic lives in the colony channel, not the monitor.