Interaction State Modeling

interaction-state-modeling

Registry Trigger

Use when

• model empty loading error success disabled focused and permission states

Do not use when

• no task-local interaction state modeling decision is required

Skill Role

Define user-visible interaction states, transition triggers, authoritative outcomes, uncertainty, available actions, recovery, accessibility signaling, and evidence. Exclude backend lifecycle and authorization policy.

High-Value Rules

• Derive states from product and operation semantics. Name observable distinctions that change message, action, risk, or recovery rather than imposing a fixed generic state list.
• Keep empty, denied, missing, failed, pending, and complete distinct. Map each state to current authority, disclosure limits, user meaning, and allowed next action so one condition cannot masquerade as another.
• Preserve unknown outcomes. A timeout, disconnect, cancellation request, or lost response does not prove the authoritative operation stopped; offer reconciliation or safe retry according to the side-effect contract.
• Coordinate optimistic state with authoritative state. Define provisional ownership, server rejection, conflicting updates, rollback or reconciliation, duplicate action prevention, and the message shown when local and durable outcomes diverge.
• Make unavailable actions understandable and operable. Distinguish permission, prerequisite, in-progress, unavailable dependency, policy, and unsupported state, then preserve focus, explanation, and an accessible recovery path where one exists.
• Model asynchronous and partial completion. Represent accepted, queued, processing, partially applied, completed, failed, and compensated outcomes only where the backend contract exposes them, including refresh and stale-view behavior.
• Prove transitions and forbidden states. Exercise task-relevant success, denial, empty, retry, timeout, stale response, navigation, refresh, and assistive-technology signals against current frontend and service evidence.

Anti-Patterns

• Show success from request acceptance, optimistic mutation, or local completion before the authoritative effect is known.
• Collapse permission denial, absence, filtering, and load failure into a single empty or error treatment that leaks or misstates state.
• Disable an action without an owned reason or recovery path, or let a late response overwrite newer user intent.

Stop Conditions

Escalate when authoritative outcome or disclosure policy is unknown, repeat action can duplicate consequential effects, optimistic recovery can lose data, or asynchronous work lacks a completion source. Also escalate when late responses cannot be ordered or accessible state and recovery cannot be verified.

Output Contract

• interaction-state decision with authoritative state mapping, transitions, uncertainty, available actions, optimistic and asynchronous behavior, accessibility signals, forbidden states, evidence limits, and residual owners

Targeted References