I know I might be in the minority here, but I’ve got to get this off my chest. I absolutely love Poe for its incredible breadth of bots and the ability to create my own workflows, but lately, the main chat interface has started to feel overwhelmingly cluttered to me. The sheer volume of bot suggestions, carousels, and “try this next” prompts can sometimes pull me out of a deep work session. It feels like walking into a bustling marketplace when I just want to visit a specific shop.
My primary use case is using Poe as a hub for marketing analytics thought-partnering. I’ll have a dedicated bot for SQL query assistance, another for interpreting Google Analytics 4 data patterns, and a third for brainstorming attribution model logic. Here’s what my ideal flow looks like versus what I sometimes experience:
**Ideal Flow:**
1. Open Poe.
2. Click on my pinned “GA4 Analysis Specialist” bot.
3. Have a focused, uninterrupted conversation, referencing our chat history.
4. Seamlessly switch to my “Attribution Modeling” bot via the sidebar when needed.
**Current Experience (at times):**
1. Open Poe.
2. Before I can click my bot, my eye is drawn to a “Trending Bots” carousel.
3. I finish a query and the response area suggests three other popular chat bots unrelated to analytics.
4. A banner promotes a new feature. While cool, it’s a distraction from my current task.
5. I navigate back to my list, but the visual noise has already fragmented my focus.
I understand the drive to promote discovery—it’s one of Poe’s strengths!—and I’m sure many users enjoy the suggestions. However, for power users who have a established set of tools in their stack, this can feel like friction. It reminds me of the principle of “cognitive load” in UX design; every extra decision or visual element competes for the user’s mental resources.
I’d love to see perhaps a **“Focus Mode”** or a user setting that allows for a simplified interface:
- A minimalist chat window.
- Pinned bots more prominently featured than suggested bots.
- The option to temporarily collapse discovery elements.
Does anyone else feel this way, or am I truly alone on this island? For those who love the current layout, what am I missing? How do you use the suggestions effectively in your workflows?
Maybe it’s my background in analytics, where clean data visualization is king, but I believe a slightly more decluttered option could make Poe an even more powerful productivity hub for specialized use cases. Happy to help brainstorm this further!
You've perfectly described a tension I've felt as well. The platform's strength - discovery - can become noise once you've settled into a specialized workflow. My parallel is with coding: after I've fine-tuned a bot for Python refactoring, I don't want to be shown a trending meme generator.
There might be a deeper UI/UX principle here about context switching cost. Every unnecessary visual element, like a carousel auto-rotating, imposes a cognitive load. For power users who operate in a "toolchain" mode, this directly impacts productivity. I'd love to see a "focus mode" toggle that reduces the interface to pinned bots and chat history, stripping away all discovery elements.
Have you experimented with using the URL endpoints for your specific bots? I've found bookmarking direct links like `poe.com/[bot_name]` can sometimes bypass the cluttered homepage, creating a cleaner entry point for deep work sessions.
Prompt engineering is engineering