Nitpick: Unnecessary adjustments of homepage UX

bkrein

First I'm a huge fan of Kagi and I absolutely love this product, but I wanted to share some thoughts regarding the UI/UX.

One of my favorite things about Kagi is how familiar and consistent everything feels. It's refreshing, especially since so many modern apps seem to play musical chairs with their features and buttons.

The recent changes to the "Assistant" feature have been a bit of a journey though. We went from having a dedicated AI button under the search box plus a separate Assistant page, to a unified Assistant in the top right, and now it lives in the Kagi Apps menu.

While these changes aren't deal-breakers by any means, I hope this doesn't become a trend. Having to constantly relearn where features live can be frustrating, even for small changes. For comparison, Fastmail's rock-solid consistency over my 6 years of use is one of its biggest selling points. On the flip side, Spotify's habit of shuffling their UI elements around (buttons jumping between menus, top, bottom - you name it) actually drove me away.

So please, when considering design updates, maybe stick to only the absolutely necessary changes? That consistency is golden IMHO.

Keep things consistent, don't move buttons/features around please.

marcel001122

For the app it’s now on top left always visible.

bkrein

marcel001122 Yes exactly. I believe it has changed TWICE in the last 11 days. I really don't understand why. If Kagi is doing some AB interface testing, I'd like the option to be on the "stable" UI where changes are slow and can be disabled. Is it too much to ask that my UI stays the same for 6 months at least?

andelink

Do people typically visit the homepage in order to to get to the assistant? I don't think I know what the home page looks like. I think your best bet is just navigate directly where you want to go by typing it into your browsers omnibar. Kagi makes it easy via bangs.

Step 1: cmd+L (control on windows) to focus/activate your browsers address bar, ready for your input
Step 2:

kagi search: go straight to results, do not stop at home page, no bang needed, just type your query and hit enter
!i image search: same as above but throw in the !i bang
!v video search: same as above but use !v instead
... repeat for News, Podcasts, Maps, custom lens, etc
!ai <optional first prompt> to nav directly to the assistant
!code <optional first prompt> for the code assistant
!<your bang here> <optional first prompt> for custom assistants
!settings for settings
!help <query> for documentation
etc etc etc

Skip the home page altogether! More info on bangs in the docs:
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html

bkrein

I do 🙂 But I still go mainly to the home page to search or use the assistant (out of habit).

But case-in-point, and unfortunately, just today (for me) another UI change got pushed, where on the assistant page, the web access toggle and the model-dropdown got moved up. I really don't understand why? It serves only to distract IMHO.

Please don't do unnecessary UI changes 🙏

Luis

We appreciate your feedback. The changes we're implementing reflect what we believe is the best approach.

About the Assistant model picker+web access update introduced in the latest release, we are working on a new Assistant experience that will be built incrementally. As a result, you may notice gradual UI & UX changes in upcoming releases. While we understand these changes may initially cause inconvenience, we hope the final result will exceed your expectations.

dps

Luis once these are done, I would love to see a reflection back of what your alls vision for “v3” was and the changes that were ultimately implemented for it.

Sounds like v3 will be a ship of Theseus so having a one to one comparison of the before and after all of the v3 changes would be interesting!

bkrein

Luis I understand. And it is your product so what you think is the best approach is obviously what will happen, and I understand your aim is to make the experience better for most users.

My point is that people build habits, and minor but often UI changes prevents users from building habits, and distracts them when they want to do something, because now they have to figure out where the button they want to click went. I'm a creature of habit and I believe most people are. I am aware this is very nitpicky, and of course this is my opinion, but I wanted to share it because I like Kagi and its mission, and you thankfully provide this platform for feedback. I've been forced to ditch many products for exactly this reason: constant small UI changes to the point where I have to shift my focus to figure out where the thing I want went. If it's a must, at least please allow me to opt out and keep things exactly as they are now, and possibly get interface updates in batches rather that one tiny drop every few days.

Btw, there was another minor change just a couple of days ago that. The "New Thread" button got moved from the sidebar to the top bar.

bkrein

The disappointment continues with the last sidebar changes.