There’s a gap between design and development of digital products and services.
The tools in daily use are different, the understanding of problems is different and the approaches to solving them is different as well. We share the systemic thinking, not only for our own fields but for the users’ needs as well. We share the curiosity to present knowledge and information in new ways. Together we bring to life an interactive interface, and experience how our users find ways to use it in ways that we didn’t plan for. It’s a constant back and forth, which mean’s we’ll have to communicate a lot.
To improve that communication, there exist a lot of tools and plugins which offer all sorts of features. It would be impossible to connect all of them individually, but if we instead take the descriptions and terms for our work in these tools, we can find similarities. We can go further and built a mind-map of the terms and describe their relations. In the end, we’ll have the foundation for an ontology of the field of user interfaces and user experience in digital products.
[…], an ontology is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related, by defining a set of concepts and categories that represent the subject.
Wikipedia, 2022
…it works
This is not an entry in a textbook that slowly collects dust. It is written to work with existing ontologies in the web. Remember how google only had links and text snippets? The search results on google with how-to guides, videos, and business adresses are possible because website creators can share that information explicitly, thanks to the structured data of schema.org. It is not limited to the browser either: Emails with flight check-ins and bookings often include that data in the schema.org format, so your email program can read it and display a check-in button for you.
The first version is available here on github.
Next steps could be a figma plugin for naming, or a searchable website for the terms. Let me know your ideas!