Restructuring the side navigation

Overview

Mike and Nick held a working product and design session focused on a proposed restructuring of the app's side navigation. The conversation covered how to treat imports versus meetings, whether voice prints deserve their own navigation section, and whether to attempt a release today. The outcome was agreement to proceed with a single, careful restructure of the side nav: grouping it around three primary functions, promoting imports to first-class status, and dropping some low-value items. A decision on releasing today was deferred, to be revisited based on scope and availability.

Key discussion points

Why restructure the side nav now

• At 1.0, Nick stressed that changes need to be methodical and that we want to minimise churn on the side nav. Adding Refer a Friend is the trigger and the opportunity to do one deliberate turn of the side nav and tidy it up more generally. Both agreed the referral link has to live inside the nav; there's nowhere else for it. Nick dislikes the current "App" section, where a referral link would otherwise land, calling it meaningless; it only exists because there was nowhere better to put things.

Three primary functions

• Nick argued that the app now advertises three primary functions on the website, so it's logical to reflect them as three things in the nav. The proposed structure centres on a Recordings section and a People section. A live meeting is itself a recording, so it slots naturally into the Recordings section, labelled "Live".

Imports versus meetings

• Nick revisited a long-standing disagreement. He recalled Mike's position that once imported, an import becomes a meeting. Nick disagreed: a podcast or a long YouTube interview simply isn't a meeting, though it might become one and could be promoted to a meeting. Mike wasn't against separating them, provided an import can still be promoted to a meeting. Nick agreed he wouldn't separate them unless promotion (either moving or duplicating) was possible. An extra driver: people miss the file-import button all the time.

Voice prints as a nav section

• Nick proposed giving voice prints their own nav link. Mike pushed back on the concept: clicking "Voice prints" would presumably show a list of speakers, so splitting voice prints out from the Speakers section feels odd, especially since a speaker with nothing to review has their voice prints on the speaker page, not in a separate voice-prints view.
• Nick clarified that, today, the link would just take users to their voice-print review queue, a page most users never see if they have nothing to review; with zero items, you'd land on an empty page. Longer term he sees it becoming more of a dashboard, surfacing things like clustering and visualising ambiguity or overlap between voices.
• Nick tied this to the cold-start problem: users lack clarity about how the app handles voice prints. We've incrementally moved voice prints toward being a first-class concept and have settled on that terminology (the nav label could be "Voices"). "Review" was considered and rejected as unclear: review of what?
• Nick conceded he has tunnel vision on wanting a dedicated nav entry (his very first prototype had one) but is objective enough to know it and is happy to concede. The compromise: use "People" as the section, starting with Speakers, and consider a badge on Speakers to surface the review-queue size, accepting the slight ambiguity (a "3" badge might read as three speakers), which is a behaviour you only learn once.

Nav footer cleanup

• Nick wants to keep a separator at the bottom. "Feedback" becomes "Send feedback", framing both it and the referral link as actions. The referral link is visually demoted to the bottom but still present. The theme selector was questioned: how often does anyone press it, beyond once? Mike said ditch it, and it's agreed to drop it.

Import migration mechanics

• Imports currently go into the meetings table. We discussed how to handle promotion and the extra metadata for things we don't capture on imports today. Imports are tagged as imports in the database. The homepage currently shows in-progress imports as meetings, which will need some thought. Nick expects the primary import path going forward to be the nav link, taking users to the imports page, especially since nobody knows where the file-import button is and we might replace it with talat Call anyway.

Existing imported meetings

• Imports that are currently sitting as meetings will all be demoted to imports, and users can promote them back to meetings if they wish. Nick accepted the minimal blowback for the handful of people who've ever imported something as a meeting. Going forward we won't rely on the import tag; that logic applies backwards for now, and the migration will add the first-class structure.

Summary quality and LLM configuration

• Mike flagged that when a new user generates a summary with the built-in model, the results aren't great. He wants a banner, perhaps at the bottom of the summary, along the lines of "looking for better summaries? here's how to configure a different model", to promote customisation and model-switching to new users. Nick agreed there's a home for it, pointing to an existing screen he liked, potentially with wording conditional on whether the built-in model is in use.

Decisions made

• Do the side nav restructure as a single, careful turn, grouping it into Recordings and People sections around the three primary advertised functions.
• Drop voice prints as its own nav section; it doesn't yet earn its stripes. Fold it under People, starting with Speakers, with a possible badge on Speakers to indicate the review-queue size.
• Make imports a first-class thing with their own view, while keeping the ability to promote an import to a meeting (move or duplicate still to be decided).
• Existing imports stored as meetings will be demoted to imports; users can promote them back to meetings if they wish.
• A live meeting goes in the Recordings section, labelled "Live".
• Rename "Feedback" to "Send feedback"; keep the referral link demoted to the footer with a separator.
• Remove the theme selector from the nav.
• Named prompts and the toast redesign are out of scope for today's potential release.

Additional notes

• Release today. Left open. Nick isn't against releasing today; the gating factor is scope, since doing one turn of the side nav means sorting out the import work first. The plan is to get the side nav and first-class imports done, then reassess timing.