LumaVista’s interface is built around a simple idea: projects are the center of everything. This guide walks through each part of the interface so you know where things are and what they do.

The dashboard

The dashboard is your home screen. It shows all your projects as a list of cards, ordered by most recently active. Each project card displays:

Title — Derived from your research prompt. LumaVista generates a short title automatically.
Status — Whether the project is running, completed, stopped, or failed.
Last active — When the project was last updated.
Summary — A brief description of the research goal.

Click any card to open that project. From the dashboard, you can also create new projects using the New Project button at the top.

Filtering and sorting

As your project list grows, you can filter by status (show only completed projects, for example) and sort by date or name. The search bar at the top of the project list does a quick text search across project titles and descriptions.

The sidebar appears on the left side of the screen and provides navigation across the main areas:

Research — Your research projects. This is the dashboard list described above.
Chat — Standalone chat sessions, separate from a project’s chat panel.
Notes — Your markdown notes, with wikilinks and backlinks.
Library — Uploaded documents, their conversion status, and search across them.
Knowledge — Your personal knowledge base: entities, relationships, topics, and the review queue.
Tasks, Workflows, Skills, Recordings, Decks, Audio overviews, Workspaces — the remaining surfaces, some of which are tier- or feature-gated and only appear when they are available to you.
Usage — Your credit balance, where your credits went by surface, credit expiry, and storage used. See How Credits Work.
Settings — Account and preference settings, across 19 tabs with a search box.

You can reorder the primary sidebar entries to match how you actually work — the order is per-user, not fixed.

The sidebar collapses on smaller screens. On mobile, tap the menu icon in the top-left corner to open it. On desktop, Ctrl/⌘ + B toggles it.

The project view

When you open a project, the view splits into several panels:

Research graph

The main area shows the research graph — a visual tree of all the work the agents are doing (or have done). Nodes represent individual agent tasks: planning, searching, reasoning, aggregating, and report writing. Edges show the parent-child relationships between tasks.

You can:

Click a node to see its details: input, output, status, credits spent, and timing.
Zoom and pan to navigate large graphs.
Watch in real time as new nodes appear while a project is running.

Report panel

Once a project completes, the report panel shows the final synthesized report. It is structured with sections, citations, and findings pulled from across all agent work. You can read it inline or copy it for use elsewhere.

Chat panel

The chat panel lets you interact with your research. Ask follow-up questions, request changes to the report, or explore specific findings in more depth. The chat has full context of the project — the prompt, all agent outputs, and the final report.

HITL panel

During project execution, the Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) panel shows pending approval requests. These appear when agents want to expand the research into new subtopics or need authorization for specific actions. You can approve, reject, or batch-manage requests from this panel. See Guiding Your Research: Human-in-the-Loop for details.

Settings

Settings is 19 tabs, grouped into Account, Appearance, Research & Chat, and Platform. There is a search box at the top — type what you are looking for rather than hunting through tabs.

Research

Defaults for new research: how thorough, what output form, and which strategy behaviours are on. These are defaults, not locks — every project can override them, and the strategy itself is chosen per project.

Appearance

Light and dark modes. The dark theme uses warm deep brown tones rather than pure black — easier on the eyes during long research sessions. Personalization also covers which sidebar entries you see and in what order.

Account and Security

Account manages your email and password. Security is where your encryption lives: your enrolled devices, key rotation, and your recovery key. Privacy & data holds your trust floor — whether LumaVista may use external model providers at all — plus your data export and consent record.

Mobile and responsive layout

The interface adapts to smaller screens:

The sidebar collapses into a hamburger menu.
Project cards stack vertically.
The research graph view supports pinch-to-zoom and touch panning.
The report and chat panels become tabs rather than side-by-side panels.

LumaVista works in any modern browser on desktop, tablet, or phone. The full experience is best on desktop or tablet, but you can check project status, read reports, and use the chat panel comfortably on a phone.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ? anywhere to see the live shortcut list — it is generated from the shortcuts actually registered on the page you are on, so it is never out of date. The global ones:

? — Show the shortcut list
Ctrl/⌘ + K — Search your knowledge base
Ctrl/⌘ + B — Toggle the sidebar
Ctrl + Shift + L — Lock your session immediately
N — New item, on pages that have one (new research on Research, new task on Tasks)

Next steps

Now that you know where everything is, it is time to run your first project. Head to Your First Research Project for a step-by-step walkthrough.

If you want to understand the research process in depth, jump to Understanding the Research Graph for a detailed look at how agents plan, search, and synthesize.

If you missed the initial setup guide, see Getting Started with LumaVista for account creation and research strategies.