Many designers I’ve worked with want to get to screens as fast as possible. Open Figma, start laying things out, figure out the structure as they go. It works often enough that nobody questions it. But Daniel Rosenberg makes a case for why it shouldn’t be the default.

Rosenberg, writing for the Interaction Design Foundation, argues that the conceptual model—the objects users manipulate, the actions they perform, and the attributes they change—should be designed before anyone touches a screen:

Even before you sketch your first screen it is beneficial to develop a designer’s conceptual model and use it as the baseline for guiding all future interaction design decisions.

Rosenberg maps this to natural language. Objects are nouns. Actions are verbs. Attributes are adjectives. The way these elements relate to each other is the grammar of your interface. Get the grammar wrong and no amount of visual polish will save you.

His example is painfully simple. A tax e-sign system asked him to “ENTER a PIN” when he’d never used the system before. There was no PIN to enter. The action should have been “CREATE.” One wrong verb and a UX expert with 40 years of experience couldn’t complete the task. His accountant confirmed that dozens of clients had called thinking the system was broken.

Rosenberg on why this cascades:

A suboptimal decision on any lower layer will cascade through all the layers above. This is why designing the conceptual model grammar with the lowest cognitive complexity at the very start… is so powerful.

This is the part I want my team to internalize. When you jump straight to screens, you’re making grammar decisions implicitly—choosing verbs for buttons, deciding which objects to surface, grouping attributes in panels. You’re doing conceptual modeling whether you know it or not. The question is whether you’re doing it deliberately.