Experience doctrine

Designed around a person

Intent, agency, and continuity shape every Unison experience

This doctrine gives designers, engineers, researchers, and coding agents a shared direction for turning intent into useful, trustworthy outcomes.

Unison serves people

Unison begins with a person and what matters to them. The experience adapts to their language, preferences, abilities, relationships, environment, and current needs. Each person retains independent authority within a household system.

The word person keeps design attention on agency, dignity, and lived context. Technical documentation can still use precise terms such as principal, operator, participant, or consumer when a contract requires them.

Intent organizes the work

Intent is the desired outcome together with the context that shapes it. Input is evidence of intent. The system can propose meaning, ask a useful question, or attempt a governed route when the request is unfamiliar.

The interpreted intent remains reviewable. Identity, consent, policy, and capability grants establish what the system may access or do. This lets Unison feel natural while keeping consequential decisions explicit.

  1. UnderstandInterpret the desired outcome, relevant context, preferences, and uncertainty.
  2. PlanSelect eligible services, models, skills, tools, and native modalities.
  3. ConfirmPresent sensitive or consequential decisions with their information, recipient, effect, and recovery.
  4. ActInvoke authorized capabilities through their assigned services and lifecycle controls.
  5. ReflectReturn the outcome, provenance, uncertainty, receipt, and next useful choice.
  6. ContinuePreserve relevant state so the person can resume, correct, cancel, or recover.

Experiences are generated for the moment

Unison assembles the experience from current intent and semantic state. A visual composition may use direct controls, structured regions, imagery, text, or persistent information when they improve understanding. Conversation, Braille, sign, touch, switch, AAC, haptic, and future experiences use forms native to those modalities.

The person can engage through familiar software, a generated visual surface, conversation, tactile interaction, or a combination. Abstraction succeeds when the experience reduces unnecessary procedure while preserving useful evidence and control.

Every modality deserves a complete path

A complete experience lets the person express and refine intent, understand meaning and privacy state, review choices, confirm, cancel, correct, and recover. The structure, pacing, and density can vary while meaning and agency remain equivalent.

No visual screen is required for blind or visually impaired use. Conversation and Braille provide native paths. Public web content and visual surfaces remain compatible with assistive technology as part of their WCAG 2.2 AA obligation.

Presence supports attention

Unison can be quiet when nothing needs attention and direct when progress, uncertainty, risk, or a decision matters. Visual, auditory, tactile, and ambient cues respect personal preferences and the surrounding environment.

Presence communicates readiness without competing for attention. Clear status communicates active work. Acknowledgment, progress, interruption, completion, and recovery remain perceivable through the active modality.

Tools and models remain replaceable

Models interpret, extract, synthesize, and converse within scoped operations. Skills and tools provide more repeatable routes. Legacy applications and computer-use systems can contribute through authorized capabilities.

These components support an intent without becoming the authority for identity, consent, policy, recipients, incident state, or physical action. Replacing a model or tool preserves the person's context, memory, preferences, and pending work.

Consequential action follows explicit authority

Digital and physical action begins with a person's intent and proceeds through the services responsible for identity, policy, consent, capability grants, confirmation, lifecycle safety, and recovery. Agents and models may propose a route. The applicable services decide eligibility and enforce the exact grant.

Health, finance, legal, identity, emergency, electrical, and physical work receive controls suited to their consequences. Qualified human authority remains part of the path where professional judgment or immediate safety requires it.

Trust is experienced over time

Unison earns trust by remaining understandable, consistent, private, recoverable, and honest about uncertainty. The person can inspect meaningful decisions and change preferences, permissions, connections, or direction.

Long-term objectives can evolve. Unison helps a person see progress, conflicts, deadlines, tradeoffs, and opportunities while keeping final authority with the person and the services they have configured.

A concise design test

Before accepting an experience, ask:

  1. Does it begin with the person's intent and context?
  2. Does it work natively through the selected modality?
  3. Are meaning, uncertainty, privacy, and consequences understandable?
  4. Can the person confirm, cancel, correct, and recover?
  5. Does each component stay within its assigned responsibility?
  6. Does the experience preserve continuity without taking control away?