Naming and Notation — Map of Content

Most "users don't understand the product" problems are not comprehension problems. They are notation problems: a name that invites a wrong inference, a symbol whose meaning is set by somebody else's community, a primitive doing five jobs under one label, a table whose uniform typography promises a reliability you do not have.

This skill covers the part of the work that happens in names, symbols and reference material — before the user acts, not during. It owns what a symbol means, not how it is drawn, and not what the interface says back the moment something goes wrong.

Scan the descriptions, follow only the [[wikilinks]] you need.

Designing the notation

• [[references/redesign-the-notation-dont-scale-the-training]] — training cost is paid per user forever; when adoption is blocked by learning cost, change the notation, and let a fluent user design it.
• [[references/motivated-form-and-one-symbol-one-thing]] — make each element's form encode what it does, and hold one symbol to one meaning (but only for distinctions users act on).
• [[references/name-the-category-for-what-it-does]] — users reason forward from names; regular compositional names are one rule instead of N facts.
• [[references/split-one-overloaded-primitive-into-named-senses]] — when one thing does five jobs, refuse the unifying definition and document five trigger conditions.

How users actually receive it