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Software Behaviorby Joost van der Zwan
Index

Framework · Beneath · from Chapter 2

The Product Beneath the Interface

The book's defining lens. Names the system layers that shape what the visible UI can honestly express.
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The framework

Fig. · The Product Beneath the Interface
  1. State: What the system currently is — the values that determine what is allowed and what comes next.
  2. Memory: What the system carries forward across moments: history, context, identity, accumulated user truth, and what it chooses to forget.
  3. Permissions: Who can do what, when, and on whose behalf: the quiet rules that shape what is even possible to attempt.
  4. Timing: When the system acts, waits, suggests, or stays silent: the rhythm of behavior.
  5. Confidence: How certain the system is about what it knows or proposes, and how that uncertainty changes what should happen next.
  6. Autonomy: How much the system may do before it checks back: observe, prepare, act and show, or act and report, set per function and per class of action rather than once for the product.
  7. Orchestration: How separate parts coordinate: the choreography between user, machine, interface, data, and adjacent systems.
  8. Recovery: What happens when something goes wrong: the structure of undo, repair, retry, restore, and recourse.
  9. Visibility: What the system makes legible about its own behavior, state, memory, assumptions, and reasoning.

Read down from the visible surface into the behavior beneath it.

  1. 01

    State

    What the system currently is — the values that determine what is allowed and what comes next.

  2. 02

    Memory

    What the system carries forward across moments: history, context, identity, accumulated user truth, and what it chooses to forget.

  3. 03

    Permissions

    Who can do what, when, and on whose behalf: the quiet rules that shape what is even possible to attempt.

  4. 04

    Timing

    When the system acts, waits, suggests, or stays silent: the rhythm of behavior.

  5. 05

    Confidence

    How certain the system is about what it knows or proposes, and how that uncertainty changes what should happen next.

  6. 06

    Autonomy

    How much the system may do before it checks back: observe, prepare, act and show, or act and report, set per function and per class of action rather than once for the product.

  7. 07

    Orchestration

    How separate parts coordinate: the choreography between user, machine, interface, data, and adjacent systems.

  8. 08

    Recovery

    What happens when something goes wrong: the structure of undo, repair, retry, restore, and recourse.

  9. 09

    Visibility

    What the system makes legible about its own behavior, state, memory, assumptions, and reasoning.

4 · Do

How to use it

For any product, sketch what lives at each layer. The output is a system-layer map: the product behind the visible interface made clear enough to argue about.

5 · Save

The Product Architect · The Product Beneath the Interface

Framework · Beneath