Interaction system
Blue means you can act. Violet means a machine did something.
One decision that the rest of the language hangs off.
Links, buttons, focus rings, the selected row. If it is blue, clicking it does something.
Extracted values, confidence, recommendations. Violet never means “clickable”, so AI presence can never be mistaken for an invitation to click.
Most products fail this by using their brand colour for both, and users learn that the accent colour means nothing in particular. Keeping the two channels separate is what lets someone glance at a return and see, without reading a word, how much of it a machine touched.
Every state a value can be in
Click them. Editable fields type in place; AI fields open a review.
| State | Rule | Renders as |
|---|---|---|
| Editable | You type this. Nothing has claimed it and nothing will overwrite it. | |
| AI extracted | A machine read this from a document. No person has confirmed it yet. | |
| Needs decision | The AI could not settle this on its own. It is waiting on a person. | |
| Verified | A person checked the AI value against its source and accepted it. | |
| Calculated | Computed from other lines. Not typeable, but you can open the arithmetic. | |
| Locked | Cannot be changed here. The field always states why. | $84,500 |
Colour is never the only signal. Each state also carries its own border treatment — solid, dashed, hatched, none — and its own icon, so the system survives greyscale printing and colour vision deficiency. The dashed border on an AI value is doing real work: a full solid box would read as settled, and the whole point is that it is not settled yet.
Confidence
Why bands instead of a percentage.
Spot-check and accept.
Open the source before accepting.
Verify against the document line by line.
A reviewer cannot behave differently at 87% than at 84%, so showing the raw number as the headline invites false precision. The bands map to three genuinely different behaviours — spot-check and accept, open the source before accepting, verify against the document line by line — and the exact figure is still there on hover for anyone who wants it.
AI verdicts
What the AI concluded, in words a client could read.
The in-product legend
Reachable from the return header on every screen.
See it under pressure
Returns in the dataset that exercise the awkward states.