astrolabe/docs/architecture/10-interaction-and-feedback.md

10 · Interaction & Feedback

Status: interaction contract. Where 09 · Visual Design is the visual contract (how the app looks), this is the interaction contract (how the app behaves while the user works in it). It is the HOW for the cross-cutting, non-feature-specific behavior that spec §10 Non-Functional mandates as the WHAT.

These rules already live, scattered, as one-off comments across the codebase (the confirm-dialog's "transactional-modal rule," the toaster's "non-blocking outcomes are toasts," the preview's "empty is not an error"). This document consolidates them into one referenceable contract so a new feature checks the rule instead of re-deriving it — and diverges only on purpose.

Upstream sources. These principles are drawn from the design council (/council): IBM Carbon, the GOV.UK Design System, the WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices Guide, and Nielsen Norman Group. The council advises; this contract decides. When you face a new interaction decision this doc doesn't cover, consult the council, then record the resolution back here.

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1. The feedback-channel decision table

Astrolabe has four distinct ways to tell the user something. They are not interchangeable; picking the wrong one is the most common interaction bug. Choose by the nature of the message, not by convenience.

Channel	Use when	Blocks?	Dismissal	Implemented by
Confirm dialog	A destructive or irreversible action needs explicit consent (delete, revert, reset)	Yes — modal	User must choose; Escape/Cancel = no; backdrop click does not dismiss	ConfirmStore + ConfirmDialog
Toast	A non-blocking outcome happened the user should know about (save failed, published, imported)	No	Auto for success/info; persists for error/warning; always a close button	NotificationStore + Toaster
Inline error	A problem is tied to a specific surface and recovers in place (invalid spec → editor + preview)	No	Clears automatically when the cause is fixed	PreviewStore, surfaced in SpecEditor + LivePreview
Status indicator	Passive, ambient state worth glancing at (draft vs. published, storage usage)	No	N/A — it just reflects state	library draft dot; storage monitor (later)

Rules.

• One blocking question at a time. Confirm dialogs and feature modals are mutually exclusive (the modal coordinator enforces this); a confirm may layer over a modal (discard-changes prompt), nothing else stacks.
• Match disruptiveness to urgency (Carbon). A toast interrupts less than a dialog; don't use a dialog for something a toast can carry, and don't bury a consent-for-destruction in a toast.
• Errors persist; success fades. An error/warning toast waits for the user (a critical message must not vanish on a timer); success/info auto-dismiss (~6s).
• Toasts sit bottom-right, not top-right. Carbon's default is the top, but our header's action cluster (Publish/Revert, theme/datasets) lives top-right — a toast there covers the control the user just used. Bottom-anchored, the stack grows upward with the newest toast nearest the corner, and still clears the centered confirm dialog. (Toaster.module.css.)
• Toast copy: title states it, message adds to it. Every toast renders a title and a message. The title is the short headline — the action or what stopped, no terminal period ("Snippet published", "Storage full"). The message is one short sentence that must not paraphrase the title (Carbon, components/notification/usage.mdx §Body content: "Don't repeat or paraphrase the title"); it carries the consequence for a success ("Your draft is now the published version") or the next step for a fixable error. Name the specific item in the message when toasts can stack — a delete confirms which one went ("…removed \"Sales\"…").
• Toast only what the user can't already see. A success toast is for an outcome with no strong on-screen cue: a side effect (Extract creates a dataset off-screen while the user is in the editor), a disappearance (delete), or a state flip (publish/revert). An action whose result is immediately visible — a created snippet opening in the editor, a new dataset shown selected — is confirmed by that visible change; adding a toast is noise (NN/g aesthetic-and-minimalist; Carbon notification/usage.mdx "Deciding what to use"). An invisible outcome that still shouldn't toast is copy-to-clipboard: confirm it inline on the control ("Copied") with a polite aria-live announcement for assistive tech, never a toast-per-copy. This refines the spec's earlier blanket "every action toasts" (spec §01F/§02/§05, reconciled).
• The same failure can light up two channels. An unrenderable spec shows the same message inline in both the editor (§03E) and the preview (§04) — one producer (PreviewStore), two subscribers. That's intentional, not duplication.

2. Latency & feedback budgets

From NN/g's response-time limits (reference/principles/nielsen-norman.md). These are not aspirations — they're the basis of the render pipeline's shape.

Budget	Feels like	Owed feedback	Astrolabe surfaces
≤ 0.1s	Instantaneous	None beyond showing the result	Keystrokes into the buffer, hovers, toggles, selection
≤ 1s	Uninterrupted thought	None needed, but direct-manipulation feel is lost	A typical render after the debounce; opening a modal; switching snippets
> 1s	Noticeably waiting	Must not block input; show a busy indication	A heavy spec / large-dataset render
> 10s	Attention lost	Progress indicator + stay cancellable; let the user work elsewhere	(guard for large M3+ dataset work)

Rules.

• Input is sacred. Typing and navigation never block on rendering or persistence (spec §10). The render pipeline is debounced (RENDER_DEBOUNCE_MS), runs async, and uses a generation token so a slow render can't overwrite a newer one.
• Auto-save is cheap and silent (AUTOSAVE_DEBOUNCE_MS) — it never stalls typing and produces no toast on success (only on failure).
• A busy indication may overlay the preview but must not freeze the editor (spec §10). When a render might exceed ~1s, owe a non-blocking indicator; never a frozen UI.

3. The non-happy-path triad

Every surface that shows data owes three designed states, not one. The empty and error states are part of the feature, not an afterthought (Carbon empty-states, GOV.UK).

• Loading — when data isn't ready yet. Prefer a skeleton/placeholder over a spinner for structural loads; show it only for a beat.
• Empty — when there is legitimately nothing. Empty ≠ error: a blank editor renders a clean, calm empty preview, never an error (LivePreview treats blank as success). An empty list says what would be here and how to add it.
• Error — when something went wrong. Split by who can fix it:
  • User-fixable → state the consequence and the next step ("Storage full — delete snippets to free space, then edit again"). A user action is mandatory (Carbon/GOV.UK).
  • Not user-fixable → explain plainly and attach a reportable diagnostic (the operation + underlying error) so it can be traced. See services/storage-errors.ts — this split is the module's whole reason for being.
• Wording (NN/g #9, GOV.UK, Carbon content): plain language, no error codes in the user-facing line, second person, name what stopped in the title, one or two sentences in the body, never flippant.

4. Recovery & data-safety contract

The user must never silently lose work, and must always have a way back (NN/g #3 "user control and freedom," #5 "error prevention"; spec §10 Reliability).

• No silent data loss. Edits auto-save as a draft; a known-good published version is always preserved separately (§03D). A failed persist surfaces as a toast, never a swallowed promise (orchestration/persistence.ts).
• A marked exit from every committed change. Revert restores the published spec; Escape closes modals; delete/revert/reset require confirmation first.
• Resilient rendering recovers on its own. An invalid spec shows a readable error and auto-recovers when fixed — it never leaves the app wedged (§04).
• Non-destructive import. Import merges, never overwrites; on failure the existing workspace is left exactly as it was (§08).

5. Keyboard & focus contract

Astrolabe is keyboard-operable end to end (spec §10 Accessibility). The interaction patterns follow WAI-ARIA APG (reference/aria-practices/content/patterns/); the wiring lives in 04 · Routing & Global Events.

• One global router owns document-level keydown/paste; components never attach their own window listeners.
• Escape is an ordered priority chain that returns on first consumption (blocking message → modal → menu → selection) and is checked before the interactive-context gate, so it dismisses a modal even while the editor has focus. All other shortcuts are gated by isInInteractiveContext() so they never fire mid-typing.
• Shortcuts claim their key with preventDefault() so they override the browser default (⌘S doesn't "save page," ⌘K doesn't focus the URL bar).
• Focus moves into an overlay on open and returns to the trigger on close; focus is trapped within it (useFocusTrap). Destructive confirms focus Cancel first.
• Match the APG pattern for any new interactive widget — a modal is dialog-modal, a destructive confirm is alertdialog, a resize handle is windowsplitter, a toast region uses alert/status roles by severity. Don't invent keyboard models; adopt the documented one.

Resolved — pane resize handle (window splitter). A ResizeHandle is a focusable role="separator" that reports the controlled pane's size, per APG → Window Splitter:

• aria-valuenow on a 0–100 scale (0 = pane at its minimum, 100 = at its maximum), with aria-valuemin=0, aria-valuemax=100, and aria-valuetext="<n>%" for a clean announcement. The 0–100 normalization (APG's "typical") beats raw pixels: it's stable and announces as a percentage. The math is the pure sideWidthValue() in PanesStore (so it is unit-tested, not trapped in the component); the live value needs the container width, observed via ResizeObserver so it tracks window resizes, not just drags.
• aria-controls points at the pane it sizes (pane-library / pane-preview).
• Keyboard: ←/→ nudge; Home → smallest pane size, End → largest. Enter-to-collapse is deferred to M6 with the pane-visibility / toggle strip — collapsing needs a hidden-pane state that doesn't exist yet, so we don't fake it.

(Consulted via /council → WAI-ARIA APG windowsplitter. This bullet is the contract; cite it, not the APG file.)

Resolved — segmented (single-select) controls. A "pick one of N" control (fit modes, the Draft/Published view) is a radio group, never a row of aria-pressed toggles (those model N independent booleans). Use the shared SegmentedControl: role="radiogroup"

• role="radio"/aria-checked, a roving tabindex (only the selected option is a tab stop), and Arrow/Home/End to move-and-select (APG → Radio Group). One widget so the keyboard model is defined once. (Tabs were a candidate for Draft/Published; we chose radio group for consistency with the other segmented controls and to avoid tabpanel wiring to Monaco. A toggle switch was also weighed and rejected: APG defines role="switch" as on/off of a single setting, but Draft/Published selects between two named peer views with no natural "on" side — a radio group is the right semantics. Reserve the switch for genuine on/off settings. Consulted via /council → APG switch / radio-group / tabs.)

Resolved — selectable lists. A row the user selects must be a real <button> (or a proper option), not a click handler on <li> (mouse-only, no keyboard, no role). It is not an APG listbox when a row contains its own controls (e.g. a delete button) — APG forbids interactive children in a listbox. Mark the active row with aria-current="true" only on that row (don't emit aria-current="false" everywhere). Arrow-key roving between rows is a later enhancement; button-per-row tab stops are the acceptable baseline.

Resolved — snippet-list status indicator. The library row flags only the exceptional state: a single accent dot when a snippet has unpublished draft changes; a fully-published snippet shows no dot (presence = draft, absence = published). We do not give "published" its own glyph — GOV.UK's Tag guidance notes one status suffices when absence is self-evident, and Carbon's status-indicator pattern says not to highlight what isn't significant. Meaning never rests on hue (WCAG 1.4.1): it rides on presence/absence plus the dot's accessible label, and the colour is the neutral accent — not a warning hue, because unpublished work is a normal state, not a problem. The dot sits in the row's secondary metadata line (with the relative date and size), in a fixed-width leading slot so it never shifts adjacent text. (Consulted via /council → GOV.UK Tag, Carbon status-indicator-pattern, APG. This bullet is the contract; cite it, not the external source.)

Resolved — one live region per shared message. When the same error feeds two surfaces (the §1 "one producer, two subscribers" case — render errors via PreviewStore), exactly one subscriber is the live region (role="alert" on the editor, where focus is); the other shows the text visually with no live role. Two live regions would announce the same message twice.

Resolved — feature-modal dismissal & initial focus. A feature modal (Datasets, and later Settings/Chart Builder) is a passive dialog-modal: dismissed by the close button, Escape, or a backdrop click (a passive modal carries no in-flight transaction, so an outside click is a safe cancel — unlike the alertdialog confirm, where backdrop-dismiss is forbidden). role="dialog" + aria-modal + aria-labelledby the title; focus is trapped and returns to the trigger on close. Backdrop-dismiss stays correct even for the multi-view Datasets manager because an in-progress create/edit form is guarded separately by the discard prompt. Initial focus depends on size (APG dialog-modal): a large manager with semantic content (list + detail) focuses a static title (tabindex="-1") so the content's start is perceived rather than skipped to the first control; a small form modal (Extract) focuses its primary field. (Consulted via /council → WAI-ARIA APG dialog-modal. This bullet is the contract; cite it, not the APG file.)

Resolved — an error names the right fix, not a boilerplate one. Don't staple a generic remedy onto every failure. A missing dataset reference is not a JSON/spec syntax problem, so the preview gives it a tailored, fixable line — "Dataset «X» not found. Create it from Datasets (⌘/Ctrl+K), or check the dataset name in your spec." — instead of the catch-all "check your JSON syntax" hint reserved for actual parse/Vega-Lite errors. The fix in the copy must match the actual cause (NN/g #9, GOV.UK error-message). The thrown DatasetNotFoundError carries datasetName so the surface can name it.

6. Motion & accessibility as default

Not features to add later — the baseline every surface is built on.

• Reduced motion is honored globally. Animations/transitions are neutralized under prefers-reduced-motion (styles/base.css); never gate meaning on motion.
• Colour is never the sole signal (WCAG; Carbon status pattern). Pair it with a label, icon, shape, or text — a red toast border also has a title and an alert role; the draft dot has a title/aria-label.
• Every control is labelled. Icon-only buttons, toggles, and fields carry accessible names so assistive tech can announce them.
• A binary toggle exposes its state, not just its action. A theme/on-off control is a toggle button (aria-pressed) or switch (aria-checked) with a stable name, so AT announces the current state at parity with the icon a sighted user sees — not just "switch to dark" (APG → Button / Switch). The ThemeToggle uses aria-pressed + a stable label.
• The shell has a heading and a bypass. The app exposes an <h1> (not a styled <span>) so there's a heading outline, and a skip link as the first focusable element so keyboard users can bypass the header into #main (WCAG 2.4.1 / GOV.UK). Same-type landmarks carry distinct accessible names.
• Contrast holds in every theme. A theme that can't meet legible contrast in part of the UI is not complete (spec §10 / §07).

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Do / Don't

Do

• Pick the feedback channel from §1's table by the nature of the message.
• Treat loading/empty/error as three designed states for every data surface.
• Adopt the APG keyboard pattern for new widgets; route all global keys through the one router.
• Mark optional fields, not required ones (GOV.UK) — e.g. "Comment (optional)".
• Consult /council when this contract is silent — then record the answer back here.

Don't

• Don't show a blocking dialog for something a toast can carry, or hide a consent-for-destruction in a toast.
• Don't let a render or a save block typing.
• Don't treat "empty" as "error."
• Don't put error codes in the user-facing line — put diagnostics in the detail disclosure, the next step in the message.
• Don't invent a keyboard model, attach ad-hoc window listeners, or gate Escape behind the typing check.
• Don't ship a dead disabled control as a placeholder for an unbuilt feature — a disabled button explains nothing and is skipped by assistive tech (GOV.UK, NN/g). Omit the action until it works, then show it enabled (e.g. "Build Chart" appears with M4).