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[Design] Redesign research components #164

Description

@MaggieAppleton

Base branch: main
Branch: maggie/redesign-research-components
Depends on: None

Goal

Redesign the complete research request family so entry, progress, failure, cancellation, and ready states feel like one polished workflow.

Context From Planning

  • Every research component in /design-audit#authored-content currently feels underdesigned and needs a dedicated pass.
  • Research requests are inline durable cards, not standalone channels. Their identity survives failure, cancellation, and retry.
  • This is a human-reviewed design task; lifecycle semantics are already established and must be preserved.

Current Behavior

The research composer and SidecarCard-based lifecycle cards expose the necessary data and actions but have weak hierarchy, inconsistent action placement, and little visual continuity between queued, searching, analyzing, writing, publishing, failed, cancelled, and ready states.

Desired Behavior

Create a cohesive research composer and lifecycle-card family with clear progress, source/report metadata, calm loading states, legible recovery actions, and strong continuity from request to child document.

Acceptance Criteria

  • The audit covers composer empty/drafted/submitting/blocked/error states and every durable request stage: queued, searching, analyzing, writing, publishing, failed, cancelled, and ready.
  • State changes retain a stable card identity and do not visually imply a new request on retry.
  • Cancel, retry, remove, and open-child actions have consistent placement and hierarchy appropriate to each stage.
  • Ready state clearly presents title, summary, source count, Planner provenance, and navigation to the ordinary child document.
  • Loading/progress treatment respects reduced motion and does not rely on animation alone.
  • Existing persistence-before-publication, observational-read, retry, cancellation, and child-publication behavior remains unchanged.
  • Maggie approves the audit specimens before production migration.

Verification Commands

  • bun run types
  • bun run ci
  • bun test packages/editor
  • bun run e2e

Primary Surfaces

  • /design-audit#authored-content
  • Research composer and lifecycle cards in packages/editor
  • Parent document research request and child-document navigation

Expected PR Checks

  • Repo required checks

Report Requirements

  • Complete lifecycle state matrix
  • Before/after screenshots at normal and narrow widths
  • Reduced-motion and keyboard evidence
  • Confirmation that request identity and publication semantics are unchanged

Implementation Notes

  • A pending request remains an inline card with no URL, sidebar row, Conversation, or Decisions.
  • Failure, cancellation, and retry preserve request identity; reads must not restart terminal work.
  • Publication remains idempotent and persistent before the ready card or navigation row appears.

Stop Conditions

  • The design implies a new product workflow such as standalone research workspaces or grandchildren.
  • A visual change requires altering durable lifecycle or publication ordering.

Activity

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