Interface Design

Meridian Claims Assistant -- interface design. Every element below traces to a failure mode named in failure-catalogue.md.

First-contact expectation setting

• Rejected copy: "Meridian's assistant makes accurate claim decisions instantly." (Implies certainty; contradicted the moment the first confidently-wrong recommendation occurs -- the exact failure this dossier's failure catalogue documents.)
• Shipped copy: "The assistant drafts a recommendation and cites the policy clauses it relied on -- always open the cited clause before you approve or deny." Names what the tool actually does (drafts, cites) and the specific adjuster behaviour (opening the citation) that survives a wrong draft without contradicting the copy itself.

Traces to: the confidently-wrong, no-citation failure mode -- this copy sets the expectation that citations are load-bearing, not decorative, before the adjuster ever sees a recommendation.

Selective uncertainty and provenance policy

Policy: an uncertainty badge fires on a recommendation when any of the following holds:

1. The recommendation's calibrated confidence bucket falls below the 92nd-percentile accuracy threshold measured against Meridian's held-out eval set.
2. The cited policy clause requires cross-referencing more than one section (a common source of the subtly-wrong failure mode).
3. The claim's damage-photo classification confidence is itself below its own threshold -- a second-order signal specific to this feature's multi-modal input.

Provenance: every recommendation's rationale is restructured from free text into per-clause fields (decision, primary_clause, supporting_clauses, exclusions_checked), each linked directly to the exact policy section it cites, highlighted -- not merely named. Verifying the Section 3.1-versus-3.4 confusion from the failure catalogue's silent-failure trace now takes under ten seconds: the adjuster opens the highlighted clause link and reads the actual exclusion language directly.

Accessibility: the uncertainty badge carries a text label ("Verify before approving"), a distinct triangle icon independent of colour, and a screen-reader-announced aria-label; its text contrast measures 6.3:1, clearing the WCAG AA 4.5:1 minimum for normal text.

Verify: the uncertainty policy's three trigger conditions are each a concrete, measurable property rather than a subjective judgment, satisfying co-06 and co-07; the provenance links open directly to the cited clause, satisfying co-09 and co-10's practical-verifiability rule; the badge survives a colour-blind and screen-reader reading, satisfying co-06's accessibility requirement.

Key takeaway: Restructuring the rationale into per-clause fields with direct citations is the single change that converts the failure catalogue's most damaging failure mode (confidently wrong, uncited) into a recommendation Dana can check in under ten seconds instead of accepting on faith.