Bottom-sheet peek — calmer variants
You found the shipped peek (Briefing button + a right-aligned DEFCON / sync / events / on-watch stack) too busy. These keep the same information but reduce the visual noise. Each shows the collapsed peek sitting at the screen bottom.
Briefing stays the only button. Everything else becomes ONE quiet line of dot-separated chips — no stacked right column. Threat is a colored dot, not a shouty label. Calmest option; scans left-to-right.
Briefing becomes a confident full-width bar tinted by threat level (amber here). A single tiny meta line under it. Strong primary action, clear hierarchy; costs ~12px more height.
Lead with a slim DEFCON ribbon (the most glanceable signal), Briefing + a compact 'on watch' below. Good if threat level is the thing you most want surfaced. Briefing is secondary.
The control strip at the bottom of the open sheet
Today (shown first) it crams a briefing-mode dropdown, a voice picker, an OPERATOR READY status, a last-sync timestamp and a PULL FEEDS button into one cramped horizontal row — five unrelated things competing. The variants regroup them by job: one primary action, settings tucked away, status kept quiet.
Five competing controls on one line. No hierarchy; the timestamp and status text fight the buttons.
One job per tier. PULL FEEDS is the clear primary (full-width, refresh glyph + relative time baked in). Brief-mode + voice collapse behind a single ⚙ that opens the existing Settings. Status becomes a one-line whisper. Reads as a tool, not a dashboard.
A single tidy toolbar: refresh, voice, brief-mode as equal-weight icon segments, with the status dot at the left edge. Compact and symmetrical. Slightly less obvious which is the primary action than A.
Opening the sheet — beyond a bare grab handle
The thin grab handle works but isn't obviously interactive, and drag is the ONLY way up. These add an explicit, tappable affordance so people who don't think to swipe can still get there. (The drag gesture stays in all of them — this is additive.)
A wider grabber with a chevron that TAPS through peek → half → full (and back down at the top). Swipe still works; the chevron just makes 'there's more' obvious. Try the toggle:
The handle carries a tiny rotating label ('▲ swipe up for feed' → '▼ swipe down'). Zero ambiguity about what it does; very slightly noisier than a bare bar.
Drop the drag entirely: a floating 'Feed' button on the globe opens the list as a full sheet; the peek shrinks to just Briefing + threat. Most discoverable, biggest departure from today's design language.
More mobile ideas
A grab-bag of smaller concepts worth considering — each is a sketch, not a spec. Say which are interesting and I'll prototype them properly.
Category filter chips
A horizontal scroll of Conflict / Political / Economic / … chips pinned above the feed list, so filtering is one tap instead of opening the drawer. Mirrors the globe's beacon colors.
Pull-to-refresh the feed
The native mobile gesture for 'get me the latest' — overscroll the feed to fire the same Pull Feeds call. Pairs well with shrinking the control row (#3).
Tap a globe pin → same detail sheet
Reuse the #5 detail sheet for globe-pin taps too, so tapping a beacon and tapping a feed card lead to the exact same surface. One mental model.
Filters within thumb reach
Filters live top-left (hard to reach one-handed on a big phone). A small filter button in the peek row — or the drawer edge-swipe from the bottom-left — brings it into the thumb zone.
Threat-level ambient tint
When DEFCON is CRITICAL, give the peek a subtle red top-edge glow that the whole shell shares — peripheral awareness without another label.
Landscape = split view
In landscape, put the globe left and the feed right (no sheet) — the bottom-sheet model wastes a wide-but-short viewport. Low priority, but cheap with the existing components.
What I’ll do once you pick
- #2 / #3 / drag — tell me a letter for each (my picks are tagged my pick); I build + 4-gate + ship + verify live, same as #1/#4.
- ideas— name the interesting ones and I’ll prototype them here first.
- #5 detail sheet — already approved; building it next as its own pass regardless.