Home Screen Cards

Overview

Cards are the interactive building blocks of your home screen. Each card serves a different purpose — from starting a conversation to browsing help articles or opening a form.

Two cards always open the home screen, in this order, and cannot be moved or removed:

AI Assistant — the "Ask me anything..." box, with the quick action buttons you define under it.
Active Conversation — the shortcut back into an ongoing chat, shown only while one is running.

Everything else you arrange yourself. You add, remove and reorder the six remaining card types from Brand → Chat widget → Home, and they appear below the two fixed ones, stacked vertically in the exact order you set.

Row-shaped cards placed next to each other — Start a Conversation, External Link, Form, Documentation and Help Articles — are drawn as one panel, their rows separated by hairlines, so a run of shortcuts reads as one list instead of a stack of boxes. The AI Assistant, Active Conversation and News cards always stand on their own and end such a run. There is nothing to switch on: the order alone decides, and a card that is hidden at the moment (the Active Conversation card before the first message, a News card with no posts) never keeps two neighbours apart.

Card Types

Four of the six types you can add depend on what your account includes: Form needs Tickets, Help Articles needs the knowledge base, Documentation needs the paid Documentation module, and News & Updates needs News. A type you don't have still appears in the Add Card picker, but greyed out and unclickable, with "Not included in your plan" under it. Help Articles and Documentation are greyed the same way until the brand actually publishes a knowledge base or a documentation set — the picker then reads "Requires Knowledge Base" or "Requires Documentation".

AI Assistant (fixed, always first)

The AI Assistant card is an input field reading "Ask me anything...". Visitors can type a question directly and press Enter to start a conversation.

Below the input, you can add quick action buttons — small pill-shaped shortcuts that visitors can tap instead of typing.

You set them up under Action Buttons — "Shown under the question box as tappable suggestions." — with Add Action. Type each label (and, for a Send Message button, the message it sends) in your own language; the other languages are behind the globe button next to the field. A button with no label is not shown to visitors — the editor warns you with "Without a label, visitors never see this button."

Each button has a type:

Send Message — sends a pre-written message and opens the chat
Open Link — opens an external URL in a new tab
Open Form — opens a specific form inside the widget
Open Article — opens one of your knowledge base articles in the widget
Open News Article — opens a news post in the widget
Open Documentation — opens your documentation portal in a new browser tab
Start Workflow — starts one of the brand's workflows in the chat

Open Form, Open Article, Open News Article and Open Documentation are tied to the same paid features as the cards above, and Start Workflow needs Workflows. They behave differently from cards in the editor: a type your account doesn't include is left out of the list entirely instead of being greyed out.

A Start Workflow button offers the widget brand's active workflows. Tapping it shows the button's label as the visitor's message and starts the workflow in the chat. While someone from your team is assigned to the conversation, nothing starts — the label reaches them as the visitor's message instead. The button is hidden from visitors when its workflow is deleted, set to Inactive or no longer belongs to this brand, or when your plan no longer includes Workflows; it comes back on its own once that is fixed.

Quick action buttons are great for common questions. Add buttons like "Pricing", "Demo", or "Report a bug" to help visitors get to the right place in one click.

Active Conversation (fixed, always second)

The Active Conversation is drawn attached under the AI Assistant box, inside the same panel and separated from it by a hairline, so the two read as one thing: start something new, or pick up where you left off. It only appears when the visitor has an ongoing conversation, and it shows:

The last message preview (text or "Attachment" for files)
The avatar and name of whoever wrote last — the agent's photo, the bot avatar for Vex (or the AI mark on your brand color when there is none), or a grey silhouette and "You" for the visitor
A status dot on that avatar: the agent's own green (online) or red (offline) dot, or — when Vex wrote last — a green dot while someone on your team is online
A relative timestamp ("just now", "5 minutes ago")
A pulsing red dot when there are unread messages

Clicking the card takes the visitor straight back to the chat.

This card is always part of the home screen and hides itself automatically when there are no messages. There is nothing to set up and nothing to manage.

HELP (Knowledge Base Articles)

The HELP card is a "Search for help" row that opens the Help tab, with one indented row per article hanging under it. Visitors can open an article straight from the home screen or tap the search row to jump to the full knowledge base. It is row-shaped, so it merges with neighbouring Start a Conversation, External Link, Form and Documentation cards into one panel (see above); on its own it is a panel of the search row and its articles.

Article selection:

The articles come from the knowledge base your brand publishes on its public web address, which is chosen on Brand → Knowledge. There is no per-widget knowledge base to pick.
By default the card shows the first 4 published articles (sorted by weight); you can instead select specific articles on the Home tab to curate what appears.

Clicking an article opens it in the widget's knowledge base view.

DOCS (Documentation)

The Documentation card is a shortcut to your brand's public documentation portal. Clicking it opens that portal, at the brand's own web address, in a new browser tab.

What you configure:

A Title and a Description, exactly like the Message and Link cards — type them in your own language; the other languages are behind the globe button next to each field (see Widget Languages)
A Documentation picker listing the documentation sets in your organization

The card shows a book icon that transitions to a chevron on hover.

NEWS

The NEWS card displays news posts as rich preview cards with optional hero images, a title, and a content snippet.

Article selection — the card's Always Show the Newest Post switch decides where the posts come from:

Switch off (default): pick the exact posts under Selected News. Leave the selection empty and the card shows the top 2 posts of your news list instead.
Switch on: the picker disappears and the card always shows the single post at the top of your news list — normally your newest published post, since every new post is created on top. Reordering with the weight arrows on Marketing → Engagement → News & Releases pins a different post there. Drafts never appear, and a new post reaches the widget the moment you publish it — no need to re-save the widget.

Your hand-picked selection is kept while the switch is on, so switching it off again restores it.

Clicking a news card opens the full article in the widget's news section.

MESSAGE

A simple card with a title and description that opens the chat tab when clicked. It sends nothing by itself — a quick action button of the Send Message type is what sends a pre-written message. Use it as a direct "talk to us" call-to-action.

Default text:

Title: "Send us a message"
Description: "We'll get back to you as soon as we can."

The card shows a chat bubble icon that transitions to a chevron on hover.

LINK

An external link card with a title and description. Clicking it opens the URL in a new browser tab.

Use this for linking to external resources like documentation, your main website, booking pages, or anything outside the widget.

The card shows a link icon that transitions to a chevron on hover.

FORM

A card that opens a specific form when clicked. Forms belong to the ticket board they feed, so you build them at Tickets → (board) → Forms — bug reports, feature requests, contact forms, surveys, and more. Every form in your organization is offered in the card's picker.

Form icon options:

Icon	Use Case
Document (default)	General forms
Bug	Bug reports
Map	Location or roadmap feedback
Light bulb	Feature requests, ideas

The icon is configurable per card in the dashboard settings.

A Form card is only shown to visitors while its form still exists and your plan includes Forms. Otherwise the widget skips it silently, even though the card stays listed on the Home tab of the designer.

Card Styling

All cards share the recipe your theme sets:

An elevated surface washed with as much brand color as the Cards setting on the Design tab asks for — Neutral, Subtle, Medium or Strong (see Appearance & Theming)
No hard border: a half-strength hairline and one soft shadow
Corners from the Corners setting — Square, Rounded, Soft or Pill
When the background reaches the Whole screen the cards sit on your brand color, in inks solved to stay readable on it
Hover effect that lifts the card slightly upward
Icon animation on hover — the card's icon smoothly swaps to a chevron arrow

Adding and Reordering Cards

Open the Chat widget

Go to Brand → Chat widget → Home.

Add a card

Click Add Card and pick a card type in the dialog. Type its title and description in your own language — the other languages are behind the globe button next to each field — and set the type-specific options underneath.

Reorder cards

Use the Move Up and Move Down arrows on a card — they appear when you point at it — to change its order. The top-to-bottom order in the settings is the exact order visitors see on the home screen.

Remove a card

Click the delete button on any card to remove it from the home screen.

What a New Widget Starts With

Every chat widget opens with the AI Assistant and the Active Conversation — they are fixed and are not part of the list you arrange. A brand-new widget's AI Assistant comes with two quick action buttons already written for you: "How does it work?" and "Talk to a human". You can rename them, point them somewhere else, add more or delete them.

Below the two fixed cards a new widget starts empty. Everything there is yours to add.