Lab 12 · Profile and tool · rebuilt on Untitled UI

Twelve routes I had counted as done.

I said ten of ten were specified last time. Eight were. Profile, six routes, and Tool, six routes, had never been built, so here they are, and they turn out to be the two that test the system hardest in opposite directions.

A profile is the only record that is about a person rather than a transaction, and it holds the material with legal weight on it: passport numbers, consent, a private-record rule. A tool is the only surface that is allowed to look different, and the question it settles is how much.

The screens, rebuilt

Drawn fresh from the Untitled kit and the system’s ruled tokens, not restyled from the originals.

Consent · three legal positions on the fill rule
Opted inOpted outNever asked

Never asked is a legal position, not a soft no: the absence of a lawful basis takes the resting outline, three genuinely different positions under CAN-SPAM, TCPA and GDPR without a fourth colour, enforceable at query time.

A tool · the world clock, its own small application
New York-125°17:10
London-117°22:10
Dubai37°01:10
Tokyo25°06:10

The tool test: remove the content and a person must still know they are inside Tripbooks. The frame, the faces and the dispositions stay; everything else is the tool’s own.

The funnel · two of its four sizes
Enquiries164
Quotations113
Bookings61
E2,224
Q1,533
B1,079
lost0

Each stage measured against the first, never against itself; an empty stage draws an outline, never nought per cent.

The reasoning, kept

01 / the profile

Three layers, because the reader asks three questions.

Who is this, how is this account handled, and what has the agency decided about them. Identity, then five stable facts, then tags. The shelf never grows, which is the only thing keeping a customer header from becoming a dashboard.

02 / the part with legal weight

Data the interface must be reluctant to show.

A passport number is not a field, it is a liability. The design job is to make reading one feel like an act with a record attached, without making it so tedious that a person photographs the screen instead.

03 / the tool

The Weather Center, and the chart problem it forces.

A climate profile is temperature and rainfall, two measures on wildly different scales, over the same twelve months. This is the exact situation that produces a dual axis, which we banned. Here is the alternative, and it is better rather than merely safer.

04 / how far a tool may depart

Four things fixed, everything else free.

Six tools, each genuinely its own small application: a globe, a calendar, a map, a currency pair history, a news brief. If every tool obeys the register grammar they will all be worse. If none of them does, the platform stops feeling like one product. The line I would draw:

Why the funnel appears here too

The same primitive, at profile scale, answering a different question. On a register row it says how this customer converts against every other. Here it says how this relationship behaves over its whole life, and the rates between the stages are the thing an account manager is actually judged on. One component, three sizes, three questions.

Never asked is its own state, and it needed its own mark

Opted in is settled with value, so it is solid green. Opted out is settled without value, so it is solid red. Never asked is not a soft no, it is an absence of a lawful basis, so it takes the resting outline, which has meant "no clock is running" since Lab 01. Three genuinely different legal positions, and the fill rule separated them without a fourth colour.

The test I would apply

If a person can tell they are still inside Tripbooks with the tool's own content removed, the tool has departed enough and not too much. Frame, faces, dispositions and a live tie to a trip are what carry that. Everything else is the tool's job to solve for itself.

The research, kept whole

The lab’s own decision tables, extracted verbatim.

Fixed for every tool
Why
The frame
Rail, entity, top bar, command bar. A tool is inside the platform, not beside it, and the entity still decides the currency and the permissions.
The two faces
Inter for everything read, Plex Mono for every figure (ruled to Inter in Lab 19). A temperature is a figure and it is mono, the same as a price.
The five dispositions
A verdict is a status. "Rain likely" is theirs, "unaffected" is won, "nothing recorded" is resting. A tool never invents a sixth meaning for a colour.
The tie back to a record
Every tool answers against a real trip, and the answer lands as rows joined to items. A tool that cannot be pointed at a booking is a browser tab and should stay one.
Free
Why
Layout and density
A calendar is a grid, a globe is a canvas, a climate profile is two stacked charts. Thirty-one pixel rows are meaningless here and forcing them would be cargo cult.
Its own primary control
A lookup bar, a place picker, a date scrubber. The register toolbar is Search, Filter, Views, Columns and none of those are the question a tool is asked.
Illustration and map
The only place in the operator interface where a picture is allowed to be the content rather than the encoding.

What this lab asked

  1. The tool rule. Four things fixed, everything else free. This governs six tools now and every future one, including whatever gets built next year.
  2. Never asked as a resting badge. Three legal positions on consent, separated by the fill rule rather than by a fourth colour. Worth confirming, because getting this wrong is a regulatory problem rather than a design one.
  3. What consolidation looks like. Every ruling now lives across twelve lab pages. The next piece of work is one specification: tokens, components, rules and the archetype catalogue in a single document a build can be handed. Say the word and I write it.
The original document, in its own chrome and drawings, is kept unedited: open the original.
Tripbooks Design SystemBuilt on Untitled UI · Inter for language, IBM Plex Mono for every figureLight and dark from the same tokens