Communicate Unknowns and Confidence

A record arrives with almost nothing usable on it, and the decision returns unknown. That is the correct answer, and the earlier guides worked hard to make it possible.

The interface displays it in the same grey, in the same position, in the same style as a not-a-prospect result. Sellers learn within a fortnight that grey means do not bother. Every unknown in the system is now being treated as a rejection, which is precisely the outcome those two guides existed to prevent, undone by a stylesheet.

An unknown is a request, not a verdict

The distinction to hold: a normal outcome says something about the record. An unknown says something about the evidence. They are different kinds of statement and should not look alike.

An unknown is also the only outcome with an obvious next action attached, and displaying that action is what stops it reading as a dead end:

Not enough information to decide. Missing: company identification. This record has a free email address and no company name that can be checked. Add a company or confirm the person's employer to get a decision.

Compare with what it replaced, which was a grey chip reading “Unknown.” The same applies to a not-scored state. A record outside the window a score applies to is not unhealthy. It reads blank, blank is labelled “not scored yet,” and the label says when it will start being scored.

Say what confidence means, in words

Make the Decision established that a confidence figure describes how strongly the inputs pointed somewhere, and is not a probability of being right unless somebody has measured that. The display rule follows from it.

Do not show an uncalibrated number. A reviewer shown 0.87 will do arithmetic with it: they will treat it as roughly six times more trustworthy than 0.15, and compare it to the 0.91 on the record above. None of that is supported. Use bands with stated meanings instead: strong signal when every criterion evaluated cleanly and all required evidence was observed; mixed signal when criteria disagreed or a deciding input was inferred rather than observed; weak signal when required evidence is missing or stale and the answer rests on less than the card asks for.

Three bands with plain definitions carry more usable information than a decimal, and they do not invite comparisons the number cannot support.

Confidence and outcome are two dimensions

Display them separately, and resist folding confidence into the outcome. “Route to a seller, weak signal” is a real and useful combination: the answer is probably right and rests on thin evidence, and the seller should know both halves. Collapsing that into a single softened outcome loses the half the seller can act on. State confidence per decision run, not per field, and re-state it every run rather than letting a figure from an earlier run persist beside a newer answer.

Carry this into your business

Find where your system displays its least certain output and ask a user what it means. An honest uncertainty that gets read as a verdict has been converted into one by the interface around it, and the fix there is copy rather than code.