UXR Intake and Evidence Collection: Working Concepts
Status: Working Concept: Intentionally Partial Version: 0.2
Summary: A developing multi-channel intake model centered on empathetic conversational AI, accessible alternatives, verifiable evidence, continuity, privacy, and user control.
Document status. This document establishes working principles and collects design notes for a future UXR intake system. It does not represent a functioning service, adopted evidence methodology, final technical architecture, or promise that every channel will launch at the same time.
Why intake matters. A reporting system can reproduce the harm it seeks to measure. Fax-only submission, broken web forms, voicemail-only fallback, repeated restarts, inaccessible categories, and channels that cannot accept ordinary evidence transfer the organization's operational failure back onto the person seeking help. UXR intake must itself meet UXR Blue Zone standards.
Primary pathway: empathetic conversational AI. The primary concept is a narrowly trained intake AI that accepts voice or text, lets a person describe what happened in their own words, and then asks focused questions to develop a complete report. It should support multiple languages, accessible interaction, plain language, save-and-resume continuity, and a pace appropriate to the person rather than forcing everyone through the same rigid form.
The AI's role. The intake AI should help organize and clarify, not decide whether the person deserves belief. It must avoid leading questions, distinguish the person's words from its own inference, preserve the original account, identify uncertainty, ask for correction, and let the person review and approve the structured summary before submission.
Alternative intake channels. UXR should consider an adaptive web form, conventional category-based forms, email forwarding, secure file and share-link upload, human-assisted telephone or video intake, live chat, submissions through a chosen caregiver or advocate, accessible paper or mail pathways, and future application programming interfaces or structured bulk submission for trusted public-interest organizations.
Cognitive-load threshold and immediate exit. Intake must watch for signs that the process itself is exhausting, confusing, repetitive, distressing, or unsafe. A person should be able to switch immediately to a simple structured form, pause, or request human assistance without re-entering information, re-uploading evidence, defending the request, or starting over. The system should carry forward the existing narrative, answers, attachments, consent choices, and unresolved questions.
Channel continuity. A person should receive a case identifier, save progress, move between channels without starting over, add evidence later, export their own submission, review what UXR recorded, correct mistakes, understand what happens next, and track status. A failed channel must lead to a functioning alternative rather than a dead end.
Evidence requests. The process should request verifiable support when reasonably available, including forwarded emails, screenshots, photographs, recordings, saved voicemails, chat logs, receipts, notices, system exports, authenticated share links, integrity tokens, timestamps, or direct records supplied by the responsible organization.
Evidence remains under human control. People must understand what they are providing, how it may be used, who may receive it, what will be public, what will be redacted, how long it will be retained, and how to withdraw or restrict material where possible. UXR should collect only what serves a defined purpose.
Reports without documentary proof. A report should not be discarded merely because the person lacks an artifact. UXR may seek corroboration, request records from another source, compare independently submitted accounts, examine public information, or preserve the report as an unresolved signal. Accumulated independent evidence can support pattern detection, but volume does not automatically convert an allegation into fact.
Identity confidence and claim confidence. UXR may need ways to estimate whether submissions originate from distinct people rather than bots, paid campaigns, or duplicate accounts. Those controls must remain separate from evaluating the claim and must not require public identity, forced surveillance, or unnecessary personal data. Protected and anonymous reporting must remain possible where risk justifies it.
Human assistance and escalation. People must have a route out of the AI pathway when disability, distress, complexity, safety, language, technical failure, or personal preference makes human assistance necessary. Immediate danger, urgent medical needs, threats of violence, and other time-sensitive conditions require clear routing beyond ordinary research intake.
Continuity after submission. Intake should not end with a receipt number and silence. The future system should preserve the contributor's connection to the report, support correction and supplementation, provide understandable status information, and connect the person to relevant resolution knowledge where appropriate. The separate development document on contributor continuity defines this intended layer without fixing its final workflow.
Systems not yet defined. UXR is intentionally not yet fixing evidence weights, confidence scales, identity-assurance methods, AI evaluation tests, human-review thresholds, retention periods, moderation rules, integration standards, status taxonomies, or scoring consequences. Those decisions depend on the evidence, severity, participation-integrity, privacy, governance, and domain frameworks now under development.
Next development stage. The next step is to design and test a limited intake prototype using representative scenarios, including stressful narratives, incomplete evidence, conflicting records, accessibility needs, anonymous reporting, channel failure, cognitive overload, requests to switch channels, and attempts to manipulate the system. The pilot should measure both information quality and the human burden created by intake itself.
Question for Review
Which intake channels, protections, evidence pathways, and failure modes must UXR address before piloting an intake system?
Explore the UXR Framework
- UXR: Founding Declaration
- What UXR Means by Human Agency
- The Universal Scope of UXR
- Friction, Pain, Harm, and Invisible Taxes
- UXR Independence and the One-Way Authority Rule
- How UXR Creates Accountability
- Severity, Urgency, and Recoverability: Development Notes
- Evidence Validation and Confidence: Development Notes
- Participation Integrity and Anti-Brigading: Development Notes
- UXR Intake and Evidence Collection: Working Concepts
- Contributor Continuity, Resolution Knowledge, and Reform Recognition
- UXR: Current Project Status
- Contributing to UXR