A presenter cockpit: why the sidebar should never be an afterthought

Most Q&A tools are built around the audience. The UX is lovely for the person with their phone out. But the presenter — the person holding the clicker and the attention of 200 people — gets a cramped dashboard with seven tabs.

TA pilot approaches it differently. We call our presenter view "TA Mode" and it's designed to be a cockpit, not a dashboard.

What a cockpit means

A cockpit is:

• Glanceable. One look tells you what's happening. No hunting.
• Keyboard-first. Actions take a keystroke, not a mouse hunt.
• Minimal. Only the controls you need right now are on screen.
• Rhythmic. The controls map onto the rhythm of a talk — one

question at a time, answer, next, answer, next.

Glanceable: one question, centered

TA Mode spotlights a single question at a time. Big type, center screen. The audience's upvotes are shown as one number, not a chart. The question's author shows as one initial, not a profile card. Your eye doesn't have to travel.

Keyboard-first: A, D, U

Three keys handle 90% of moderation:

• A marks the current question answered (and advances to the next)
• D dismisses it
• U undoes the last action

The arrow keys navigate. Nothing else. You never touch the mouse during a live session.

Minimal: what's not on screen

TA Mode deliberately hides:

• The session settings (they're in the sidebar, where you can leave them)
• Historical questions (the answered pile is collapsible)
• Anything related to creating or editing a session

During a live talk you cannot afford to be in "edit mode." A cockpit is a one-way street: it reads from the session, it doesn't let you restructure it.

Rhythmic: the answer-question loop

Every talk has a rhythm. You say something. Someone reacts. You pick up a question. You answer. Next.

TA Mode maps to this rhythm. The spotlight is one question. You answer it out loud. You press A. The next question slides up. Your eye goes back to the center.

What this costs

Cockpit design has tradeoffs. You give up:

• The ability to see the full queue at once (it's 3 clicks away)
• Rich formatting options (no markdown, no embedded videos)
• Multi-moderator collaboration (one presenter at a time)

Those tradeoffs are right for live talks. They're wrong for, say, a multi-day hackathon support channel. Pick the tool that matches the shape of the work.

Try it

Install TA pilot, create a session, pop it open in TA Mode (the window icon in the sidebar). Use the arrow keys, A, D, U. See how it feels to run Q&A without ever touching the mouse.