PRODUCT.md

Who Highlight is for, what its interface is for, and what it must never look like. How it looks is DESIGN.md; how it sounds is BRAND.md.

Who it's for

Knowledge workers on teams of roughly 30 to 250, using Highlight inside the working day rather than as a destination.

• Managers run a team or a function and spend much of the week rebuilding context, reporting up and passing on decisions made elsewhere.
• Individual contributors do the work and lose time to scattered tools and lost context.

Both rebuild context that already exists, answer the same question in several places, sit in meetings held only to gather information, and rarely reach deep work.

Highlight is used while something else is the real task: in a meeting, or just out of one, finding what was actually said. The interface is not the object of attention and shouldn't compete for it.

Purpose

Highlight should look like one product: the same button, ink and distances on every screen, in both themes, whoever or whatever built it. A fast screen that brings its own grey, or a fifth button height, costs more than it delivers.

Personality

Delightfully simple, personal and empowering, the interface half of the voice in BRAND.md.

• Simple because it was edited, not because things were left out. Density is fine when every element in view is doing work.
• Personal, warm and alive, without performing a personality it doesn't have.
• Empowering: the person decides. Show the evidence, keep actions reversible, and never present the product's inference as the person's conclusion.

Not this

• AI-product chrome. Purple-to-blue gradients, glowing sparkles, shimmer on generated text, a chat bubble as the answer to everything.
• Density by accident. Grey on grey, a border around every region, sixteen controls where three would do.
• Notetaker sameness. The purple-accent transcript list with a summary card on top. Looking like the category makes the product interchangeable with it.

Principles

1. One product, not one author. A screen that is better on its own but different from its neighbours makes the product worse.
2. Simple because it was edited. Reach simplicity by removing, not by withholding.
3. The person decides. Evidence first, actions reversible, nothing presented as their conclusion.
4. Warm, not whimsical. Personality lives in precision and the occasional considered moment, not in decoration.
5. Missing is a finding. When the system has no answer, write it down. Improvising a value is how a system stops being one.

Accessibility

WCAG 2.2 AA, pointer-first, held equally in both themes. Text that carries meaning clears 4.5:1, focus is always visible, and colour is never the only signal: state also shows in text, icon or position.

Accepted on purpose:

• Controls are 20 to 48px tall, under the 44px touch minimum. A touch surface gets a larger hit area, not a larger box.
• Borders are seams, under 3:1. An edge that must be seen uses the focus colour.
• A field's resting edge is a seam too. It becomes a real boundary on hover and focus, so every field needs a visible label.
• Brand yellow is a fill at 1.23:1 on light. It never carries meaning or sits under small text.