Designed for Use

When to Make Things Discoverable

Not every feature of your product is relevant at all times. So after you’ve decided which features should be discoverable, you should decide when they need to be discoverable.

One way to do this is to use contextual or modal user interfaces. Let’s see how this could work for a vector graphics editor. Your users probably want to be able to rotate objects, so you need to add a “Rotation” property to your toolbar or inspector window (Figure 19, ​Adding a rotation property​).

Figure 18. Adding a rotation property

But now you need a toolbar or an inspector window. And you need to make sure that the “Rotation” property ...