UXR Intake and Evidence Collection: Working Concepts

Document status. This document establishes working principles for UXR intake. UXR now has an operational internal intake workbench and governed processing records, but this does not mean a general public intake service, finalized evidence methodology, or final technical architecture has launched. Channel availability and public access remain separate development questions.

Current internal Intake AI reference path. Before processing intake, the agent must read adopted UXR Processing Invariants, use the UXR System Registry to locate the current canonical Notion modules, inspect the live Notion property descriptions and relation types, and read the module's Active Field Contracts in UXR Schema Dictionary & Field Contracts. The normal processing sequence is Intake Session → Candidate Proposition → Proposition Source Resolution → resolved Proposition, with Case Boundary Decisions and Case Work Orders where needed, followed by the appropriate Incident Case, Evaluation, Evidence, Update, Handoff, and release-control records. The agent must read back writes and must not use legacy platform fields or remembered historical schemas as current authority.

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 genuine uncertainty or conflict without manufacturing suspicion, ask for correction, and let the person review and approve the structured summary before submission.

Record provenance without suspicion. Intake should record the source of a proposition plainly. “The contributor reports…” is sufficient when the proposition comes from the contributor. When a screenshot, forwarded email, transcript, recording, or other artifact supports it, the intake record should add that support affirmatively. The system should not automatically append phrases such as “unverified,” “awaiting verification,” or equivalent credibility-reducing language merely because an artifact has not been provided. Provenance should help readers understand the evidence while preserving contributor dignity.

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 and useful, 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. The request for supporting material should communicate that the material adds support; it should not imply that the contributor's account has no value without it.

Corrections and supplemental evidence. Contributors should be able to refine dates, wording, amounts, sequence, interpretation, and other details as they remember more or obtain records. Intake should preserve the original account privately while carrying the best-supported current facts forward into the working case. Supplying better evidence should be treated as improving the record, not as creating a credibility penalty for the contributor.

Public correction without contributor callout. When later evidence establishes a better-supported fact, the public case should normally be rewritten around that fact and the superseded public detail removed. UXR does not need to tell public readers that a contributor originally remembered ordinary wording, timing, or another detail differently unless the discrepancy itself materially affects the case. The internal working record should preserve the provenance and correction history needed for auditability.

Evidence can change the case in either direction. New evidence may strengthen a proposition, weaken it, narrow it, contradict it, change responsibility, or require a different case boundary. Intake and case-management systems should support those changes without making correction feel punitive. The objective is a more accurate case, not a performance evaluation of the contributor's memory.

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 remains evidence even when 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 for future matching and investigation. The absence of documentary proof should not trigger language that treats the contributor as presumptively unreliable. Accumulated independent evidence can support pattern detection, but volume does not automatically establish every proposition.

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 stage is to continue exercising the internal intake workbench and regression suite against representative scenarios, including stressful narratives, incomplete evidence, conflicting records, accessibility needs, anonymous reporting, channel failure, cognitive overload, requests to switch channels, later artifacts that refine earlier remembered details, and attempts to manipulate the system. Testing should measure both information quality and the human burden created by intake itself, including whether contributors feel safe correcting the record, while public-service launch remains a separate readiness decision.