Reference
UXR Taxonomy: Terms, Meanings, and Connections
Defines HXR terms across human ends, human treatment, agency, human costs, externalities, burdens, reform mechanisms, verified reform, and the distinction between means and ultimate outcomes.
HXR uses a growing vocabulary to describe how human-made systems affect people, distribute burdens, and preserve or constrain human outcomes.
You do not need to learn this taxonomy before using or understanding HXR. It is a reference system, not an entrance exam.
Human Ends, Human Treatment, and Reform Means
Human Dignity
The inherent worth and standing of a person. Human dignity is not granted, earned, purchased, scored, or created by HXR or by an institution. A system can recognize or disregard dignity; it cannot remove the dignity a person inherently possesses.
Dignified Treatment
Conduct and system behavior consistent with human dignity. Dignified treatment recognizes that a person's time, body, objectives, limits, evidence, voice, privacy, and standing matter.
Respect
The behavioral recognition of another person's dignity. Basic human respect does not require admiration, agreement, approval, deference, or the person's preferred outcome.
Human Outcome
A consequence for people that HXR is trying to preserve, restore, or improve, including practical agency, dignified treatment, understanding, practical access, safety, health, opportunity, recovery, and human capacity.
Human Capacity
The finite personal resources through which people live and act, including time, attention, cognitive and emotional energy, memory, physical effort, care capacity, and material resources.
Standing
Recognition that a person's interests, objectives, limits, evidence, and consequences count in a system's decisions and corrective processes.
Voice
A person's practical ability to express an objective, experience, objection, or concern and have it enter a consequential pathway rather than being ignored or procedurally erased.
Dignitary Harm
Treatment inconsistent with a person's inherent dignity, including degrading, humiliating, dehumanizing, dismissive, or objectifying treatment and system behavior that treats the person's time, body, objectives, limits, evidence, voice, privacy, or standing as though they do not matter. Dignitary harm does not mean the person's inherent dignity was removed.
Reform Mechanism or Lever
A method that may help produce change, including evidence, contribution, visibility, aggregation, comparison, scoring, institutional response, accountability, public attention, or lawful external pressure. A lever does not make a factual claim more true merely because it creates influence.
Verified Reform
A supported system change that has been implemented and tested sufficiently to show what changed, which human outcomes improved, what remains uncertain, and whether the improvement endures.
Ends and Means Rule
Complaints, praise, contributions, public records, visibility, scores, pressure, and even reform are not HXR's ultimate ends. They are mechanisms or intermediate results. HXR succeeds when human-made systems recognize dignity in practice, preserve or restore practical agency, and return human capacity while maintaining legitimate safety, rights, accuracy, consent, access, and remedy.
Scope and Method Terms
Human-Made System
Any product, service, institution, process, rule, space, infrastructure, technology, or organized practice designed, maintained, required, funded, regulated, or mediated by human beings.
Observation
The stage that identifies the person's objective, the sequence of events, the conditions, the measurable or supportable costs, and the outcome without yet claiming a complete cause or moral judgment.
Explanation
The stage that tests which mechanisms, incentives, policies, decisions, or system components contributed and distinguishes supported inference from uncertainty.
Evaluation
The stage that considers necessity, proportionality, distribution, comprehensibility, contestability, responsibility, and remedy after the evidence boundary has been established.
Agency, Responsibility, and Asymmetry
Institutional Capability
The combined information, continuity, authority, staffing, automation, expertise, legal resources, financial resources, and redesign capacity available to an institution.
Responsibility Scales With Capability
The developing principle that the side better equipped to carry coordination, recordkeeping, explanation, correction, or risk should carry proportionally more of that burden.
Institutional Asymmetry
A difference in information, records, continuity, authority, expertise, resources, time, or power between an institution and the people who depend on it.
Practical Agency
The real ability to understand and use a choice, right, appeal, or remedy under actual conditions.
Anticipated Burden (Working Term)
The work, delay, conflict, uncertainty, or emotional expenditure a person expects would be required to challenge the offered outcome.
Burden Avoidance (Working Term)
Choosing not to pursue a better outcome because the correction or escalation path appears too costly.
Adaptive Acceptance (Working Term)
Accepting the first available answer after experience has taught the person that challenge is unlikely to justify its cost.
Unexpressed Objective Loss (Working Term)
The loss of an outcome that a person wanted or reasonably should have received but stopped pursuing before creating a visible dispute.
Burden and Cost Terms
Human Cost
A measurable or supportable cost imposed on people, including time, effort, attention, money, constrained agency, reduced safety or health, lost opportunity, or dignitary harm.
Human Externality
A human cost created by a system but excluded from the institution's own accounting, performance metrics, or decision model. Human externalities can exist without money or profit.
Burden Transfer
The movement of work, complexity, delay, risk, coordination, confusion, or cost from an institution onto the people who use or depend on it.
Extractive Burden Transfer
Burden transfer in which an institution gains while imposing avoidable, disproportionate, uncompensated costs on people who lack meaningful choice or remedy.
Shared Efficiency
A change that reduces work or cost for both the institution and the person rather than merely moving the burden downstream.
Shared Inefficiency (Working Term)
A system failure that consumes resources on both sides without producing the intended outcome.
Total Resolution Time (Working Term)
All time spent by the person and institution until the objective is completed or abandoned.
Repeat-Contact Burden (Working Term)
Additional interactions caused by failure to resolve the original objective.
Resolution Yield (Working Term)
The proportion of interactions that produce a usable, durable result.
Population-Averaged Burden (Working Term)
The total burden divided across a relevant population and time period. It does not imply equal burden for each person or day.
Burden Distribution (Working Term)
How a total cost actually falls across different people, including concentration among groups with fewer alternatives or greater exposure.
Burden Cascade (Working Term)
A primary system failure that produces secondary and downstream costs across time, money, health, safety, infrastructure, environment, attention, or opportunity.
Human Time Dividend
The estimated time returned when a verified reform removes avoidable burden while preserving or improving comprehension, accuracy, safety, consent, access, and remedy. Any estimate should disclose population, period, assumptions, distribution, uncertainty, and baseline.
Interpretation and Review Terms
Interpretive Stress Testing
A development method that examines how different professional, moral, cognitive, cultural, historical, and fictional lenses understand, misclassify, simplify, resist, or over-amplify UXR.
Correctly Recovered Principle
A conclusion that accurately reflects the framework as written.
Communication Discovery
A new metaphor, explanation, or translation that clarifies an existing UXR idea without changing the framework.
Reasonable Misunderstanding
A mistaken interpretation that a careful reader could plausibly reach from the current documentation.
Documentation Ambiguity
Language or structure that reasonably supports more than one meaning and may require revision.
Lens-Imposed Conclusion
A conclusion produced mainly by the reviewer's prior worldview rather than by UXR's documentation.
Framework Proposal
A genuinely new concept or method suggested by a review that UXR has not yet adopted.