📄️ An Introduction to Conceptual Design
When you design software in terms of concepts, you can test in terms of concepts. This is hugely powerful and allows, for example, you to plot your app's learning curve with great ease. After reading this page, read the page on the Conceptual Burden for more information about this.
📄️ Reification, Polymorphism, and Reuse
Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and Wendy Mackay set out three design principles for visual interfaces, arrived at while rebuilding Design/CPN, a tool for editing and simulating Coloured Petri Nets — a genuinely complex, non-linear professional workflow if ever there was one. The resulting interface, cpn2000, dispensed with pull-down menus, scrollbars, and even the concept of selection, and did more, not less, than the tool it replaced. The three principles explain how.
📄️ Writing Concepts
The concepts and actions you ask users to learn shape the learning burden. Their number is a useful design prompt, but does not predict learning speed on its own: familiarity, relationships, feedback and the work itself matter too. Start with Understanding the Work, then test whether people can understand and apply the concepts.
📄️ What's Next?
Once you have your Concept or Concepts, share them with your developers to make sure they make sense and that any points that need clarifying get resolved. Then use a prototype to test the concepts with representative users before committing to the full implementation. Include an ordinary task and a plausible change of plan. Can users explain the objects and relationships, predict an action's effect and revise the result? Testing with Users describes how to record independent success and the help required. Stakeholder agreement is useful, but cannot answer these questions on its own.