Courtesy of Tudor Goode

Relationship model

Steps to create a relationship model

• Step 1: Research
  • learn about all the entities involved in an area
  • learn about the interactions between them
• Step 2: Add all the entities involved
  • examples of entities: usually nouns like people, objects, orgs, artefacts
• Step 3: add interactions
  • Add all the interactions between entities
• Step 4:
  • look at how an interface or system you're building needs to adapt to the reality depicted in the model
  • Are there entities and interactions your interface is ignoring?
• Entity properties
  • This helps for dealing with a situation where there's multiple interactions between two entities
  • instead of doing multiple lines, from NSA to Device:SP,
  • say "NSA controls SP" but describe somewhere the properties of the SP device you can control: 1,2,3
  • for each one those entities, describe the properties somewhere, so you dont end up with all the props ON the relationship diagrams

Things to keep in mind

• this shouldnt be temporal, its just the relationship of these elements in a particular stage of the customer journey
  • with designers having experience doing diagrams that occur over time, it can be a reflex to tackle relationship diagrams in the same way
  • don't try to create a flow of actions for one entity through other entities
  • its not, "i do this, then i do this,"
  • its about how these things relate to each other
• only directly connect an action to the entity that initiates it, what does each entity "do" with each other entity
• its tricky to know what you should break up, and it depends what your goal
• leverage existing models if possible
  • Tudor's existing model that describes the patient and professional relationship and mentions "interactions between them" as a reference to build on