Structured Card

A structured card is a UI primitive in card-based interfaces in which an agent surfaces a discrete unit of work — a draft, an approval request, a clarifying question, a routing decision — for human review. The card carries the full context the human reviewer needs to make a decision, and the response options on the card map cleanly to the agentic system's next-step actions.

The practical advantage of structured cards over chat-style review is that the reviewer's cognitive load is bounded by the card. The reviewer reads the card, sees the response options, makes a decision, and moves on. The conversational state is externalized. The decision is atomic. The reviewer can process many cards in a session without the conversation-management overhead that chat surfaces impose.

The design discipline that separates good structured-card interfaces from bad ones is the discipline of what to include on the card. A good card has the minimum context required for the decision and no more — the relevant inputs, the relevant outputs, the relevant constraints, and the available response options. A bad card has too much (forcing the reviewer to wade through context) or too little (forcing the reviewer to leave the card to gather what they need). Mature card-based systems treat card design as a first-class artifact of the workflow design, not as incidental UI work.