Bridging the gap between atomic design and conceptual models
To truly understand a digital product as a complete entity, our industry has two powerful but somewhat disconnected frameworks. Brad Frost’s Atomic Design gives us the language for the visible architecture of a product, the tangible components we see and interact with. Parallel to this, the academic work of MIT’s Daniel Jackson on Conceptual Models gives us a rigorous language for the invisible foundation, the deep logic and rules that govern how a product behaves.
Practically, these two worlds are often treated as separate domains. The result can be a gap in our understanding, which is one of the things causing friction in teams and compromises to the overall user experience.
This article aims to bridge the gap between these two frameworks. By synthesising the work of Frost and Jackson, I will deconstruct the digital product as a single, cohesive system. I will start with the visible surface and move layer by layer to the foundation, revealing how the invisible architecture shapes everything we see.
Layer 4: Patterns
We begin with the most tangible layer of product architecture: Patterns. This is where we arrange our components into recognisable flows to solve a…