📄️ 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
As you’ll discover later, the speed of onboarding, and the post-onboarding learning curve are essentially governed (and can be predicted) by the number of concepts (and actions) you have.
📄️ 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. Once this has been done, and the Concepts have been approved by whatever stakeholders are involved in the design process, you're ready to start development.