I designed the loop an approvals tool usually skips: tracked revisions, named duplicate correction, and a live SLA clock.
How it was built, and why
Verso is a concept product for workflow-driven approvals, requests, and ticketing: the kind of internal console a mid-size company would use to route spend approvals, vendor onboarding, IT access, and time-off requests through a real multi-step process instead of email threads.
The flow
A requester submits through the Intake Portal: pick a workflow type, fill a dynamic form built from that workflow's own schema, get a confirmation with a tracking link. The request lands in Triage, where a suggestion panel proposes the right workflow, owner, and labels, and flags likely duplicates through a named cause, impact, recovery path rather than auto-merging them silently. Once accepted, it enters its workflow's step chain, a manager approval, then finance, then procurement, each step showing a live SLA clock and an action panel to approve, reject, or request changes. A request sent back for changes re-enters as a tracked revision loop, not a silent overwrite, then moves forward again once resubmitted. The final approval can generate a document, an HTML purchase order with its own print stylesheet, and the request resolves into a complete, immutable audit timeline. Switching identity, requester, approver, agent, or admin, is one act-as control in the topbar, and each role sees a permissions-appropriate version of the same rail.
What it is
Verso is a concept product for workflow-driven approvals, requests, and ticketing: the kind of internal console a mid-size company would use to route spend approvals, vendor onboarding, IT access, and time-off requests through a real multi-step process instead of email threads. It ships against a fictional company, Northgate, with a full cast, 8 people across 4 roles, and 4 published workflows, so every screen shows a live, populated system rather than an empty shell.
How it works
Built as a plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript desktop web app with no build step and no backend: all state lives in the browser's localStorage, seeded on first load and fully restorable with a two-click reset-demo control. The visual system is a from-scratch implementation of a Wrangle-derived, Mobbin-researched register, split into a foundation stylesheet, a near-white neutral surface system, a single Northgate-indigo accent, and a deliberately muted four-tone status language, positive, attention, critical, neutral, with no literal green, red, or amber anywhere, and an approvals-specific layer built only from those tokens: the step chain, the SLA meter, the triage panel, the purchase-order artifact. The Workflow Builder is a visual node-and-inspector editor on a fixed-canvas frame, where publishing a workflow forks a new version while requests already in flight keep the version they started on, so a policy change never silently rewrites history mid-flight. The whole system runs on 12 seeded requests spanning every lifecycle state, including one mid-revision loop and one breach-risk SLA clock, so the product never has to be demoed empty.
Why it matters
The interesting design problem in an approvals tool is not the happy path, it is the loop: what happens when a request gets sent back, when a likely duplicate almost slips through, when an SLA is about to breach. Verso exists to design those moments properly, a tracked revision instead of a silent overwrite, a named correction path instead of a silent auto-merge, a live clock instead of a due date buried in a table, rather than shipping the version of an approvals tool that only looks good in the first five minutes of a demo.
