IxDF Certificate of Completion

Organize interfaces around the conceptual objects users care about, with their attributes and operations, instead of stitching together disconnected features, screens, and actions.

Distinguish a user's conceptual model from a system or engineer's model and align designs with users' mental models so interfaces feel natural and stay stable even as visuals evolve.

Separate functional requirements from non-functional requirements (constraints), classify constraints as technology or quality-of-service (performance, security, localization, accessibility, usability), and express functional requirements as stories of use rather than premature design.

Write and elaborate use cases through use case diagrams (with actors, roles, and swim lanes) and use case narratives, expand brief stories of use into richer narratives or design maps, identify conceptual objects by extraction of nouns, and surface gaps in the conceptual model before costly assumptions reach implementation.

Replace abstract roles in agile user stories with researched personas to create persona stories, written in the third person and based on real behaviors and needs, so designs serve actual people instead of imagined users.

Spot hidden epics inside simple-looking stories, and break epics into smaller, sprint-sized stories of use with clear parent-child links.

Apply Pruitt and Adlin’s persona-weighted feature matrix and prioritization matrix together to score features against weighted personas and technical feasibility, so the team prioritizes based on research-backed user value and collaboratively identifies the high-impact, low-effort "sweet spot."

Work fluently across Cook and Daniels' three levels of object-oriented design: essential (the problem domain), specification (views, attributes, and operations), and implementation (full detail and prototypes).

Build conceptual models as UML class diagrams that express associations, aggregation, inheritance, association classes, and composition, and use this shared notation, camelCase conventions, and object-oriented terminology to speak the same conceptual language as developers and reduce miscommunication.

Write stories of use that focus on an individual (real or persona), provide meaningful context, sit at the interaction level when elaborating models, and feed directly back into expanded views, attributes, and operations.

Use sketches to explore many ideas fast, bypass the inner critic, invite team feedback, and translate conceptual models into concrete interfaces without premature polish.

Apply Bob Virzi's four dimensions of prototype fidelity (breadth of features, degree of functionality, similarity of interaction, aesthetic refinement) alongside the visualization selection matrix to match the right artifact, whether sketch, wireframe, or low- or high-fidelity prototype, to the situation based on complexity, criticality, and uncertainty.

Create design maps as a collaborative sticky-note tool that combines personas, persona stories, constraints, comments, questions, and ideas with sketches, wireframes, or prototypes to communicate the who, what, and how of implementation in one shared view.

Polish design maps for developer handoff with reference markers, labeled phases, friction-area highlights, consistent layouts, and a clear key or legend so anyone can read them.

Decide when to introduce new conceptual objects versus reuse established models (such as the standard e-commerce checkout) so each new feature strengthens the interface instead of fragmenting it.