Explain like I'm five · Software Design
What is a Dialog Map?
A dialog map draws how you move between an app's screens. Here it's a house with rooms and doors.
An app is a house with many rooms.Every screen is a room.
Forget to draw the doors and people get lost.You end up with rooms you can enter but never leave.
A dialog map is a map of the rooms and doors.Boxes are rooms, arrows are doors: press this, land there.
Box = rooma screen, a menu, a pop-up
Arrow = doora button press, or a timer running out
It's a map, not a recipe.A flowchart says what to do next. A dialog map says where you can get to.
Draw it, and the missing doors show.A Checkout with no cancel. Fixing it on paper, before the house is built, is cheap.
In one breath
A dialog map = a map of an app's rooms (screens) and doors (moves). It finds where people get lost, before building.
A technique from Karl Wiegers' Software Requirements. It doesn't draw the furniture (screen layout) — that's a different picture.
When grown-ups say it
- State
- A room. A web page, a menu, a dialog box — the screen the user is standing in.
- Transition
- A door. How a button press or a system event moves you to another room.
- State-transition diagram
- The grown-up name for this map. A dialog map is one applied to screens.
- Flowchart
- A recipe. Draws order and decisions. Answers a different question than the map.
- Cancel path
- The way out. The door most often found missing once you draw the map.
- Requirements
- The plans before building. Cheap to fix here, expensive after it's built.
- Karl Wiegers
- Who made the map well known. Software Requirements, 3rd ed.