Action Confirmation

Confirmation is the control that separates a helpful agent from an alarming one. The design question is which actions require it, because confirming everything trains people to click through and confirming nothing removes the human from the loop entirely. The workable line is usually reversibility: actions that can be undone cheaply proceed, actions that cannot — sending external communication, altering a system of record, committing spend — stop for assent. The confirmation also needs to present enough context for the decision to be real rather than reflexive.

Confirmation in Centralpoint is a workflow state rather than a dialog box, so an action pending assent is a record with an owner, a timestamp and an audit position. Data Triggers carry the notification, and because the pending action and its approval are both records, the evidence that a human decided survives the interaction that produced it.