The design of Mavii is the result of the intense and collaborative effort of Mavii Studios and DeezyBreezy®. When Nick Chapman and Mark Mayo, talented innovators from Mozilla, envisioned Mavii in early 2023, they already knew that artificial intelligence would play a central role in the future of search engines. As design partners, we approached this with a clear philosophy: don’t just make it “look” smart, but make it feel smart. That meant keeping the UI clean, composable, and responsive to nuance. It meant building a framework where users weren’t forced into a single interaction model, but could flow naturally between reading, scanning, clicking, and asking — just like they do in the real world.

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→ Mavii 2.0. Respecting to the traditional browsing.

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Mavii started as a smart search engine — like Google, but built around AI. Chapman and Mayo wanted search to be clearer and more useful, understanding user intent, processing queries with real context, and delivering valuable answers, not just endless links. That’s how the first version of Mavii, with an AI assistant at its core, was born.

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Instead of reinventing the wheel, we looked at how users already consume information in search environments — and built around that. The AI Summary Card was designed to blend in, not disrupt. It slid naturally into the existing results, surfacing relevant insights right where the user expected them. But it wasn’t static. Depending on the context, it would reshape itself — visually and structurally — to match the nature of the query. Always contextual, always adaptive. And it didn’t dead-end: users could go deeper, asking follow-up questions to explore the topic further.

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The team could have stopped there — refining the idea, making gradual improvements. But 2023 was different. The AI race had begun. With Google and Bing jumping into the game, it became clear: just building another smart search engine wouldn’t cut it. So Mavii changed course. Instead of a traditional search, it became an AI-powered chat that helps users find information through conversation. Of course, there were already players — Perplexity, You.com, and others. But that’s what made the path even more exciting. We set out to explore what could make AI search not just different, but better.

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→ Mavii 2.0. Jumping into experiments.

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Mavii’s goal is simple: make AI search feel natural, useful, and engaging. Whether you’re looking up 50s greatest hits, comparing Marshall gear, or exploring Sidney Opera House architectural blueprints, Mavii makes every search smooth, intuitive, and rewarding.

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In 2023, most AI chat products, intentionally or not, distanced themselves from traditional search engines. The emphasis was on novelty, on being different. Mavii’s design team followed that spirit early on, especially when it came to structuring information. The standard layout placed the AI-generated text up top, with a horizontal grid of three or four card-like links underneath.

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It looked fresh — but the more we reflected, the more something became clear: traditional search still had the upper hand in one crucial area—scanability. So we asked ourselves: what if we stopped trying to reinvent the experience, and instead fused the familiarity of search with the depth of AI responses?

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That question led to the next design evolution:

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① A shift toward vertical link structures, making it easier to scan and explore results;

② A move away from rigidly splitting text and links, blending them into a single, living response;

③ The introduction of a side panel—a classic list of links, designed for users who want full manual control over how they explore results.

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Together with Mavii Studios, we didn’t set out to build just another AI chat.

We set out to build a bridge—between classic search and what’s next.