The Field Kit

The Worksheet

Blanks to fill before design begins

The full worksheet is a working document: every blank is a decision your product has to make, and generic answers are wrong answers. Work it in order; each section depends on the one before. Two ways to use it: from scratch, fill every section before opening a design tool; reviewing, fill it from what the system implies, then compare with what it does. Every gap is a finding.

Its sections, and the chapter each one leans on:

1. Emotional register — three feeling-words, the never-feel-like, the person's typical state and the contexts that differ from it. (We've Optimized the Soul Out) 2. Entity vocabulary — every first-class thing, the person's relationship to it, its typical action, the stakes of deleting it; which are created constantly, which are deleted rarely at high cost. (Two Steps Ahead, Design What It Is) 3. Action vocabulary — for each kind of action, the gate, the sequence, the reversibility, the error contract. (The Second Time You Delete Something) 4. Spatial system — the base unit, the tiers, what each is used for, the density and why. (The Gap Is Saying Something) 5. Elevation and treatment — each level, its name, its meaning, its value; every distinctive treatment and the sentence it completes. (Every Treatment Is a Promise) 6. Navigation and top layers — the scopes and where they live; your system's answers to the seven top-layer questions (Codex: Top Layers). (Codex: Navigation, What Happens to Where I Was?) 7. Feedback — for each action kind, the acknowledgement, the outcomes, the channel, the weight. (Silence Is a Message) 8. Voice — how it speaks, what it never says, the error that sounds like us. (The System's Voice) 9. Forms — the nine questions in Codex: The Form.

The worksheet itself is in the appendix.