Every choice below traces to Alex's philosophy document, the Hooked model (Nir Eyal), and current app design practice. The old product had 15 screens competing for attention. This has 3 destinations and 1 loop.
Alerts are problem + solution
Straight from the vision doc. The notification never says "engagement decreased." It says what happened, that Art-E knows why, and that one change fixes it. Curiosity, not data. Tapping it opens Art-E directly, no searching for answers.
One next move, above everything
Hick's law: fewer choices, faster decisions. The home screen leads with a single recommended action and its predicted payoff. The feed sits below it, three cards visible, each one sentence + why it matters + one action. When everything is shown, nothing feels important.
Art-E is the centre, literally
The orb is the physical centre of the nav and every path leads through it. Explanations show their evidence in plain language with a "why I believe this" line: sample size, sources, confidence. That is the Sprint 8 grounded RAG made visible, and it is what builds trust in an AI copilot that asks before it acts.
Variable reward, all three kinds
Hooked's reward types live in the feed: the hunt (new discoveries chip), the tribe (creator matches), the self (wins that beat prediction, the streak). Gold is reserved for reward moments only, so the colour itself becomes the dopamine cue.
Investment closes the loop
Confirming a recommendation plants tomorrow's trigger ("I will report back"). Rating advice literally trains the model, and the interface says so. Every cycle the user invests, the product gets sharper, and the next open gets more likely. That is Hooked phase four, working for us.
What we deliberately hid
Dashboards, charts, raw metrics and reports are not gone, they moved behind Art-E: "show me the full data" is always one ask away. Discovery is not a directory, it surfaces as feed opportunities. Tesler's law: the complexity still exists, the system carries it now, not the user.
Type: Bricolage Grotesque for display, Outfit for UI (brand continuity), JetBrains Mono for evidence. Colour is semantic: teal = act, violet = Art-E, gold = reward, rose = attention. Desktop keeps the same three layers: single-column feed, Art-E as a persistent right rail.