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Auditability UX
Auditability UX is the design of traceability that people can actually use: operators, compliance, support, and sometimes end users. It’s not “logging exists”. It’s whether a human can reconstruct what happened and decide what to do next.
Definition
- Auditability UX makes system actions and decisions inspectable: who/what acted, when, with what inputs, under which policy, producing which outcome.
- It includes both customer-facing cues (status, receipts, decision summaries) and operator-facing surfaces (logs, dashboards, case views).
- Auditability is a trust feature and a governance primitive.
Why it matters
- In regulated contexts, you must prove compliance; in high‑stakes contexts, you must investigate incidents. Both require usable audit trails.
- Auditability reduces support debt: when evidence is visible, issues are resolved faster and escalations become rarer.
- With agents, auditability is the safety net: autonomous actions are acceptable only when they are reconstructable and reversible.
- Auditability UX is also a design constraint: if you can’t explain the system’s behavior, you probably don’t understand it well enough to automate it.
Common failure modes
- Machine-only logs: data exists, but no human can interpret it without engineering help.
- No linkage: events are recorded, but not tied to a case, user, or decision context.
- Missing “why”: actions are logged, but reasoning constraints/policies are absent.
- Audit trails that are too granular or too vague—both are unusable.
- Compliance theatre: artifacts produced for audits that operators never consult.
How I design it
- Define the audit questions first: “What happened?”, “Who approved?”, “Which policy applied?”, “What can we undo?”.
- Design a case view: a narrative timeline with key states, events, and attachments—not raw event streams.
- Capture decision artifacts: memos, approvals, risk acceptance, and exceptions with owners and timestamps.
- Make export and retention explicit: what is stored, for how long, and how it is accessed.
- Treat auditability as part of the experience: receipts, confirmations, and status history where it matters.
- Design for the triage moment: what a support agent needs to decide in 30 seconds, and what an investigator needs to prove in 30 minutes.
Related work
Proof map claims
Case studies
See also
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