BlueprintLabs

Notes from a UI declutter pass on a tool we use every day. Half the work was deleting features we shipped a week earlier.

After three weeks of using Leverage daily, the UI had accumulated. There was a checklist score chip in the verdict banner that read like compiler output. A preset chip section under every read with four questions nobody actually clicked. A separate Saved scans list in the Log tab that duplicated the Recent activity list. A round 24 pixel icon for the trading style cycler that nobody could read at a glance. This week we cut all of it. The decisions were not hard. The trick was admitting we shipped things that did not earn their space. A checklist score that reads 1 pass 3 warn 2 fail is fine as compiler output, terrible as a chip on a trader's screen. Four preset questions under every read assumed the trader wanted to ask one of those four things. In practice they typed their own questions, the chips just took space. A round 24 pixel icon with the letter A inside it for Auto mode loses every readability test the moment you stop staring at it. We also rethought the brand color. The accent had been gold, picked because we trade gold. The problem is gold is also the semantic color for wait verdicts. So every wait UI element looked like brand, and every brand element looked like a wait state. They competed visually until the eye stopped being able to tell which was which. We swapped the brand color to indigo. Semantic colors went back to doing their job. One other thing that was small but big in daily use: we separated the chat from the scan. Before this, every follow up question to the model triggered a fresh chart capture. Type what news? and you got a new vision call, a new screenshot, a new full re analysis. Slow, expensive, and the analysis changed because the chart moved between sends. Now the default Reply button hits a text only chat endpoint that grounds in the previous read. The full rescan is still there as a secondary button when you actually want it. The pattern across all these cuts is the same. Things we built thinking this will be useful turned into noise once we used the tool ourselves for a week or two. The only reliable way to find them is to put the tool in the hands of the person who has to look at it every day.

what we cut from leverage in two weeks