Rolodex Design Verdict

Comparison matrix

Six criteria, scored out of ten

Each track's final merged prototype is scored — winner variant plus grafts, as published. Highlighted cells mark the best score per criterion.

Criterion	Native	Creative	Paper
Flow completenessAll 6 screens, 4 states, 3 canonical scenarios, role gate — present and working.	9 Every screen, state and gate live; real post-apply accretion — Meridian's profile changes after the wizard writes.	9 All flows plus a fourth lookup scenario; back-preserves-answers and mutation proven by 70+ checks.	8 All 26 screens drawn and reachable, but hotspots route to representative screens; nothing mutates.
Prospect / partner separationCan prospect intel ever be mistaken for live capability? (INV-R1)	9 Warm-paper zone foreign to all partner UI; lead cards, never a second table; "not a partner" pill in every prospect title.	10 Manila dossier + ink banner + chip legend + persistent prospect band + "system of record" badge on the live table. The strongest of all nine variants.	7 Banner treatment drawn, but the frames share the Compass palette — separation is asserted, not felt.
Entry burdenHow cheap is it for the partnerships lead to accrete intel daily?	8 "/" quick-filter with visible keycap; merged intel table reads a whole firm on one screen.	8 Evidence entry lives directly on the profile — lowest click count; but a new vocabulary to learn first.	6 Flows drawn at wireframe fidelity; burden cannot actually be exercised or measured.
Provenance & unknowns honestyUnknown-means-unknown rendered as material; every row answers who/when/where-from. (INV-R2, R3)	9 Dashed unknown chips, "absence is not evidence" tiles, ×n provenance popovers linking both ways to conversations.	10 Hatched unknowns that read "counts as nothing"; fresh/aging/stale age stamps; mono citation atoms with corroboration badges.	7 Badges and chips drawn on every row per the rules — but a picture of honesty, not interrogable honesty.
TasteCopy, restraint, coherence at daily-internal-tool density.	8 Restrained and native; the best wizard copy of the nine variants; the least memorable of the three finals.	9 A coherent material system — ink, manila, hatching — at working density. The one you remember a week later.	7 Wireframe-appropriate craft; player chrome correctly distinct from the design under review.
ImplementabilityDistance from prototype to shipped HAML in the existing Rails + Bootstrap 5 admin.	10 It is the house markup — ground-truth skeletons B1–B11 verbatim, exact SCSS token values. Near-mechanical translation.	6 Every component needs a translation pass; the 14-row Bootstrap/Rails adoption table is a real bridge but not a free one.	5 Frames reference house patterns, but every screen still needs its markup designed from scratch.
Total	53Wins on the axis that ships.	52Wins where design thinking lives.	40Judged as a spec; strong as a walkthrough.

The three finals

Track dossiers

Each track ran three variants, picked a winner, and merged the best ideas from the losers. What follows is the judged final of each track — direction, winning variant, grafts, and where it falls short.

Native track

Compass Rolodex

Rank 1 / 3 · 53 pts

Direction

Zero-seam Compass admin. The design budget is spent only on the four components the base system genuinely lacks: a conversation timeline, an evidence-tier chip system, provenance popovers, and the wizard as a guided rail with the INV-R4 contract pinned to it. Everything else reuses the extracted skeletons and exact token values.

Winning variant

native-v2 "NATIVE-PLUS" — beat v1 (Seamless) on separation and honesty, beat v3 (Dense Operator) on restraint. Rebuilt from v2's source parts with nine grafts.

Judge's verdict

Why it won Warm-paper prospect zone is a material foreign to all partner UI; leads are cards, never a second table. Provenance popovers with ×n re-confirmation trails link both ways to conversations. Best wizard copy of all nine variants ("answers preserved", "Your answer — only if you actually know…").

Where it falls short Least visually adventurous of the three finals, and its honesty vocabulary sits one notch below the Desk's — dashed chips where the Desk has hatching, freshness text where the Desk has age stamps. Fixable by graft.

Open Compass Rolodex 28 Playwright assertions · 0 console errors · 708 KB self-contained

Grafts taken into the final

From v3: "recorded supported / recorded NOT supported" outline pills on every prospect capability row — partner verdict badges stay partner-only.
From v3: merged "Recorded capability intel" table — the whole firm reads on one screen.
From v3: wizard step 4 rebuilt as a per-line write manifest — "Will be written in ONE transaction", "Apply — write N confirmed items".
From v3: "/" quick-filter with visible keycap; real post-apply accretion; persistent 13-link screen map.
From v1: collapsed prospect strip states why it is collapsed; omitted-prospects note moved below the leads; "Prospect — not a partner" pill in every prospect page title.
Bugfix found while merging: success flashes were being consumed by a double render on hash change — fixed.
Declined: v3's full keyboard layer and 13px density — more operator chrome than this admin warrants.

Creative track

Rolodex Intelligence Desk

Rank 2 / 3 · 52 pts

Direction

An evidence-first intelligence console designed from scratch: ink chrome, prospect intel on manila "dossier" surfaces, mono citation atoms on every evidence row, diagonal-hatch unknowns, and freshness as a first-class age stamp (fresh / aging / stale). Tier chips are monochrome signal meters — evidence strength, deliberately outside the partner verdict palette.

Winning variant

creative-v2 "Intelligence Desk" — beat v1 (Index Card, warm but card-grids scan worse than tables at admin density) and v3 (Dossier, strongest IA but all-caps mono chrome louder than a daily tool wants). Its weaknesses were purely mechanical — exactly the graftable parts.

Judge's verdict

Why it placed second The strongest prospect/partner separation and the most honest unknowns/provenance rendering of all nine variants. The heaviest QA of the three tracks: 70+ automated checks including back-preserves-answers and mutation assertions. Ships with a 14-row Bootstrap 5 / Rails adoption-path table mapped to ground-truth tokens and PRD story IDs.

Why it didn't win It is a second design system inside a Bootstrap admin. The same admins work partner screens all day; a foreign material world for one feature is a coherence tax forever, and every component needs translation before a line of HAML exists. Its best ideas travel; its chrome shouldn't.

Open Intelligence Desk 70+ Playwright checks · 0 console errors · ~172 KB single file

Grafts taken into the final

From v1: apply-really-writes — wizard apply and manual saves mutate the data, so Meridian's file shows the changes immediately.
From v1: evidence entry directly on the profile; a "make extraction fail once" toggle so the error state is reachable in-flow.
From v3: typed per-dimension field model + key-based CRUD conflict flow — contradictions update the existing row + provenance, never a contradictory sibling.
From v3: working pagination; a full-transcript route per conversation; the step-4 "what will be written" ledger; a fourth lookup scenario proving collapsed-by-default; a SuperAdmin-gated partner register.
Baseline fixes: real schema field names + numeric row ids in wizard proposals; live answer counts on step 2; mobile wizard rail.

Paper track

Rolodex Paper Prototype

Rank 3 / 3 · 40 pts

Direction

The real Paper MCP, end to end — no fallback needed. 26 artboards live in "Rolodex — Compass Admin" on the Paper canvas, exported and wrapped in a clickable player: hash routing, 229 labeled hotspots, a grouped rail of all screens, sibling-state chips (empty / loading / error / conflict per screen), auto-advancing loading frames, and a Frames index. Player chrome uses the Compass palette over a dot-grid ground so prototype chrome is never mistaken for the design under review.

Winning variant

real MCP — the live Paper file verified artboard-by-artboard; PNGs re-encoded to WebP (8.8 MB → 1.56 MB; final artifact 2.12 MB).

Judge's verdict

What it uniquely delivers The only track that leaves a living, editable design file behind — the one artifact a non-technical stakeholder can mark up directly. All six flows, all four product rules, the role gates, and all three named scenarios are drawn and reachable.

Why it ranks third as a spec Frames are pictures of the rules, not the rules working: no mutation, hotspots route to representative screens, unknowns and provenance are illustrations rather than behavior. Its chrome shares the Compass palette, so the prospect-zone separation is asserted rather than felt. None of this is a defect of execution — it is the ceiling of the medium.

Open Paper Prototype 26 live artboards · 229 hotspots · 2.12 MB · source file on the Paper canvas

Grafts taken into the final

None needed — the real MCP path held end to end; the two builder manifests matched the live file node-for-node, so no re-exports were required.
Player conventions worth noting: hotspots that route to a representative screen say so in their tooltips; an About screen states plainly how the frames were made and links the live source file with an "Open in Paper" button.

Steal list

Take these regardless of which direction wins

Specific, portable ideas — each one expressible in the existing Bootstrap idiom. The first group is the reason the Creative track exists.

From the Intelligence Desk 6 items — graft items 1–5 before freezing DESIGN-ROLODEX.md

1 · Age stamps Freshness as first-class material: dot + "8D" / "4.6MO" on a fresh/aging/stale ramp, on evidence rows, index columns, and lead cards — not a tooltip.

2 · Hatched unknowns Diagonal-hatch chips and cells reading "no data — counts as nothing". The strongest INV-R2 rendering of all nine variants; visibly a different material from evidence.

3 · Citation atoms A compact mono provenance line — CALL · 19 AUG · A.MARIN — plus an ×N corroboration badge on every evidence row, wizard proposal, and lead reason.

4 · Three-column lead card REASONS FOR / KNOWN LIMITATIONS / UNKNOWN — NOT EVIDENCE, with requested-value negatives rendered first and a visible "tier cap" note.

5 · Export toast CSV/PDF buttons state the INV-R1 rule ("exports are partner-only") instead of silently excluding prospects — the invariant becomes teachable UI copy.

6 · System-of-record badge The live partner table carries "system of record — exports come from here only", making the separation legible from the partner side too.

From Compass Rolodex 5 items — already in the recommended direction; keep them through implementation

7 · Recorded-status pills "recorded supported / recorded NOT supported" outline pills for prospects — the partner Supported/Blocked solid badges are verdict vocabulary and never appear on prospect rows.

8 · Write manifest Wizard step 4 as a per-line ledger — "update row #3401 + provenance", "existing row kept — nothing written" — under "Will be written in ONE transaction", with "Apply — write N confirmed items".

9 · Collapse reason copy The collapsed prospect strip says why: "Collapsed — live partners fully match this need." State plus explanation, never state alone.

10 · Two-way provenance links Capability row → provenance trail → conversation, and transcript view → "capability rows citing this conversation". The loop closes in both directions.

11 · The pinned contract INV-R4 lives in the wizard rail the whole time — "Nothing saves without you… abandoning discards everything" + "draft saved server-side · expires in 24h" — plus the "/" keycap quick-filter and the "Prospect — not a partner" title pill.

From the Paper Prototype 2 items — process patterns, not screen designs

12 · The living canvas Keep the 26-artboard Paper file as the stakeholder walkthrough and markup surface — the one place a non-technical reviewer can annotate the design directly.

13 · Sibling-state chips Every screen's empty / loading / error / conflict variants one click away from the screen itself. Steal this convention for every future design review, whatever the medium.

Recommendation

The ruling

Adopt the Native track's final as the implementation blueprint. The PRD's own design story (ROLODEX-006) demands screens that feel native to the Compass admin, and this is the only prototype where that demand is already met in the markup itself — ground-truth skeletons, exact token values, house conflict vocabulary. It concedes a single point to the Desk on separation and honesty, and both gaps close by graft. Adopting the Desk wholesale would mean running a second design system inside a Bootstrap admin the same people use all day — a permanent coherence tax for a one-point gain. The Paper track was never really competing on the same axis: it is the communication layer, and it should keep that job.

Write DESIGN-ROLODEX.md from the Native final.
Its screens map one-to-one onto the PRD's §1–§6 and the ground-truth flow map; the doc's layout sketches, states, and Bootstrap utility mappings can be read straight off the prototype.
Graft five Desk ideas before the doc freezes.
Age stamps, hatched unknowns, citation-atom compaction of the provenance badge, the three-column lead card, and the export-rule toast (steal list 1–5). All are expressible in Bootstrap utilities plus a small SCSS addition — no new design system required.
Use the Desk's adoption-path table as the UI-story checklist.
Its 14 rows are already mapped to ground-truth tokens/helpers and PRD story IDs — a ready-made acceptance checklist for ROLODEX-008b through -017.
Keep the Paper canvas for the room; retire it as a spec.
Use the live file for founder and stakeholder walkthroughs and async markup. Once DESIGN-ROLODEX.md is approved, mark the canvas "reference only" — two sources of truth drift.