Draft — for approval

Two registers, not one. Most of the product speaks in the Regulatory register — neutral, precise, no personality — because it is describing law, and law does not get a tone. A second, narrower Human register is allowed in a short list of surfaces where nothing legal is being stated and getting the wording slightly wrong costs nothing. It's warmer and a little more playful than the rest of the product, stopping well short of fully casual: contractions and a bit of personality are fine, wall-to-wall jokes and exclamation marks are not.

1.1Where each register applies

1.2How informal is "informal"

1.3Before / after

Either column is shippable on its own. The Human column is not a replacement for the Regulatory one — it is what's allowed in addition, only on the surfaces listed in §1.1, and never on a screen that also shows an action item, a citation, or a deadline.

Three objects. Everything else in the interface is an attribute, a state, or a view of one of them. If a fourth noun appears for the same thing, that is a content bug.

Where these words come from. Legal instrument is standard legal usage for a written document that creates rights or duties — statutes, regulations, deeds and treaties are all instruments, which is why one word can cover everything the platform ingests. Action Item is kept in plain, everyday language on purpose: it's what compliance and ops teams already call a tracked piece of work, and a reader shouldn't need to know legal vocabulary to understand it.

Instrument is still an open question. Action Item is decided: the earlier proposal to rename it Obligation is withdrawn, and the label goes back to the name the product already used.

2.1Supporting terms

A closed list. A concept that is not here does not get a name in the interface until it is added here.

Three different files, three names. Document on its own is the generic parent: it appears only in controls that accept any file, and in My Documents — the section that holds all three kinds, with a Type column to tell them apart. It is not a replacement for any of the three, because it names the file format rather than the job the file does.

Evidence leaves the interface entirely. In legal use the word belongs to procedure — what a party may put before a tribunal — and a file uploaded into a compliance tool is not that. Compliance record is the term records and compliance practice uses for exactly this object, and it carries the retention duty with it: a record is kept precisely so that fulfilment can be shown afterwards. The word “evidence” survives in this definition, where it explains the purpose, and nowhere on screen, where it would misdescribe it.

Twenty strings change. Six were reviewed and stay as they are — recorded here so the decision does not get re-argued later.

3.1Changes to apply

3.2Reviewed and kept

Six rules. Each one has a string in the current build behind it, in the left column — that is the test for whether something belongs here. Everything else is style preference, and style preference is not a rule.

Withdrawn from the earlier draft: the ban on simply, easily and seamlessly. They are worth avoiding in body copy, but there is no instance of them in the app, so this is guidance rather than a rule.

One object, one set of statuses. Vocabularies do not borrow from each other, and neither do their colours.

5.1Verification — instrument and action item

5.2Time — action item and task

These four chips are the only amber in the product.

5.3Lifecycles

• An action item can be flagged Not applicable at any point. The flag requires a written reason: the audit trail has to record why someone decided a law did not apply.
• A task can be flagged Blocked, also with a reason.
• Recurrence values are written exactly as above, in every filter, column and detail row.

A formula per message type, then the instances the product needs. New strings are written by filling the formula. Values in [brackets] come from the data.

7.1Empty states

Rows 1 and 2 are about the reader's overall status, not one specific document, so they can add a small friendly line on top of the fact, per §1: Nothing here yet — subscribe to a regulator to get started. or No action items due in the next 14 days — nice and quiet for now. The other four rows are about one specific instrument, filter, search, or task, so they stay plain and clear.

7.2Errors

7.3Notifications

The first forty characters carry the information, because that is what a push preview shows. No preamble — never We wanted to let you know that…

7.4Confirmations

The confirming button restates the action and the count. Never Yes or OK.

7.5Success and progress

• A success toast is a fact plus an undo where one exists. The fact is enough on its own — Subscribed to 3 sources, Task marked Done — and a small friendly line is fine on top of it, per §1: Nice — that's marked done. Never a friendly line on its own, with no fact underneath.
• Long operations show real progress: Extracting action items · [n] of [n] instruments.
• Skeletons, not spinners, for lists and KPI cards. Never render 0 while loading — a zero and a pending request look identical, which makes a working product indistinguishable from a broken one.
• Prefer stale data over a flash of empty: keep the numbers and add Updated [n] min ago with a Refresh control.

7.6Missing values

An input placeholder hints at a format. A missing value explains an absence. They are different jobs, and N/A does neither.

7.7Formats