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UX & Visual Presentation Principles (carry-forward)

Status: durable note, no UI yet. Captured 2026-06-17 (Matt): “we can’t overlook visual presentation — how it looks to the user is sometimes as important as functionality. We don’t have a UI yet but keep this in mind.” This doc exists so the principle isn’t lost before ClawTerm (the planned Warp-based front end) is built.

The core idea

For a trust product, presentation is not decoration — it’s how trust becomes felt. A signed ledger nobody can read is worth little; the same proof rendered legibly is the product’s most persuasive moment. Our unique UX surface is proof legibility: making verification, cost, and provenance immediately understandable.

Principles to carry into ClawTerm (and any front end)

  1. Show proofs, not logs. The hero view is the verdict + what the panel checked + the cost — not a raw transcript scroll. The ledger should be browsable and visually obviously tamper-evident (chain intact / broken).
  2. Make trust tiers visible. Verified vs Unverified vs Stale should read at a glance (color/badge), never buried in text. The trust label is the product; surface it.
  3. Cost & budget always in view. Spend, budget remaining, and per-step cost are first-class UI, tied to the local-first/cost-control story.
  4. Verification should feel tangible. A --verify pass (and a tamper catch) should be a satisfying, legible visual event — this is the demo moment that beats any competitor’s transcript.
  5. Spawn/fan-out trees are visual. Sub-agent trees, which branch won, and why, should render as a structure, not prose.
  6. Legible failure. When something fails, the message is actionable and visually distinct from success. Error legibility is a measurable UX metric (see testing-strategy + the sim-user harness).

How this connects to testing

The sim-user harness and instrumented UX proxies (turns-to-success, time-to-first- useful-output, error legibility, proof legibility) measure the interaction layer now. Visual-presentation UX gets validated with a small-N human comparative pass once ClawTerm is real. Keep these principles as acceptance criteria for that UI.