Design Guidelines

Design requirements define the experience of using Corvus. They describe what people must be able to accomplish, how Corvus should behave, and how the many parts of the product should work together as one coherent environment. They begin with the person doing the work, not with the technology underneath it.

Human

Good design begins and ends with people. Every decision we make at Corvus, from the largest product decision to the smallest interaction detail, should be considered through the experience of the human being doing the work. Technology, convention, efficiency, elegance, and technical possibility are never more important than the people we are designing for. Keeping humans at the center of every macro and micro decision is our most important design principle and our north star.

Agency

People should remain in control of their work. Corvus can anticipate, assist, automate, and accelerate, but it should not quietly make consequential decisions on someone's behalf. The person should be able to understand what happened, intervene when necessary, and decide how much assistance they want. Human judgment, authorship, and intent should remain theirs.

AI

AI should assist the parts of the work where assistance is genuinely valuable without displacing the deeply human act of designing. People should know when AI is involved, understand meaningful consequences of its actions, and remain able to accept, reject, modify, or undo its contributions. Corvus should use intelligence to remove drudgery and expand capability rather than automate away judgment, authorship, or craft.

Performance

Performance is not only an engineering metric. Waiting, lag, hesitation, visual instability, and delayed feedback change how a person thinks and works, so responsiveness must be considered part of the design itself. Corvus should feel immediate enough that the software does not become an interruption between thought and action.

Coherence

Every part of Corvus should contribute to one understandable mental model of the product. New capabilities should extend that model rather than introduce unnecessary exceptions, parallel systems, or conceptual debt. As Corvus becomes more powerful, it should strive to become more coherent rather than merely more complicated.

Grace

Corvus should behave gracefully when things do not go as planned. Mistakes, interruptions, failures, uncertainty, and unexpected conditions should never create unnecessary anxiety or put someone's work at risk. The product should protect the person, preserve their work, explain what matters, and provide a clear path forward. Grace means designing the difficult moments with as much care as the ideal ones.

Accessibility

Corvus should accommodate meaningful differences in vision, hearing, motor ability, cognition, input method, display, and working environment. Accessibility should influence fundamental interaction decisions rather than become a corrective layer added after the product has been designed. Improving accessibility should make Corvus more usable for everyone wherever possible.

Directness

Working in Corvus should feel as close as possible to acting directly on the work itself. Unnecessary modes, dialogs, confirmations, navigation, configuration, and intermediate steps should not stand between intention and action. The interface should recede as fluency grows.

Progressive Complexity

Corvus should be approachable without becoming simplistic. People should be able to begin with the information and tools they need now, then introduce greater precision, structure, information, and sophistication as the work develops. Complexity should reveal itself when it becomes useful rather than confront everyone at the beginning.

Predictability

People should be able to develop reliable expectations about how Corvus behaves. Similar actions should produce similar results, and important consequences should not come as surprises. Expertise becomes possible when the product rewards what a person has already learned.

Consistency

Corvus should feel like one product rather than a collection of features created independently. Common concepts, interactions, visual patterns, and behaviors should remain consistent across different parts of the experience. Differences should exist because the work requires them, not because the product accumulated them.

Continuity

People should be able to move among different ways of seeing and working with a project without feeling that they have moved into a different system. Drawings, models, information, worksheets, presentations, and other representations should remain connected to the same underlying work. Changing the representation should not mean changing the reality.

Context

Corvus should help people understand where they are, what they are working on, and how it relates to the larger project. Moving between details and the whole should preserve orientation whenever possible. The product should reduce the mental work required to reconstruct context.

Navigation

Moving through Corvus should be fast, understandable, and spatially coherent. People should be able to navigate projects, views, drawings, models, sheets, objects, information, and history without repeatedly losing their place. Large and complex projects should remain navigable rather than becoming organizational mazes.

Selection

People should be able to select exactly what they intend to act upon. Selection should remain understandable when geometry overlaps, objects nest, projects become dense, or several valid targets occupy the same location. Corvus should help resolve ambiguity without making ordinary selection cumbersome.

Manipulation

Moving, drawing, resizing, rotating, transforming, and otherwise manipulating things should feel direct and precise. The result should remain legible while the action is happening rather than becoming clear only after it is complete. Precision should enhance direct manipulation rather than fight against it.

Editing

Editing should make change feel safe and understandable. People should be able to modify existing work without unnecessary reconstruction, and Corvus should make the scope and consequences of meaningful changes clear. The product should encourage iteration rather than make people afraid to disturb what already works.

Recovery

People should be able to explore without fear of making an irreversible mistake. Undo should behave in ways that correspond to a person's understanding of their own actions, including when other people are working simultaneously. Recovery should feel like a fundamental property of the product rather than an emergency procedure.

Feedback

Corvus should make the results of interaction perceptible. People should be able to tell what they selected, changed, created, moved, connected, constrained, or affected without unnecessary explanation. Good feedback should increase confidence while staying out of the way.

Keyboard

Expert users should be able to work at the speed of thought without being forced through graphical controls for every action. Keyboard shortcuts and command-driven interaction should complement direct manipulation and remain connected to the same underlying actions. Different interaction styles should provide different routes through one product rather than create separate versions of Corvus.

2D Drawing

2D drawing should remain a first-class way to think, explore, document, and communicate. Corvus should provide the precision and speed required for professional drawing without forcing every mark to become a fully defined building object. A drawing should be able to begin simply and acquire greater meaning as the work develops.

3D Modeling

3D modeling should feel fluid enough for exploration and precise enough for professional work. People should be able to create and manipulate geometry without constantly negotiating the internal mechanics of the software. Three-dimensional work should remain naturally connected to drawings, information, and other representations of the project.

4D Planning

Time and sequence should be available as meaningful dimensions of a project when the work requires them. People should be able to understand how a design changes, develops, is constructed, occupied, or otherwise unfolds over time. Temporal information should remain connected to the project rather than becoming a separate planning artifact.

BIM

Building information should become useful without becoming the organizing burden of the design process. People should be able to add structure and meaning progressively rather than define everything before they can begin. The best BIM should feel like a natural consequence of doing the work well.

Objects

Objects should capture reusable design intent without becoming rigid containers that are difficult to understand or modify. People should be able to create, use, adapt, and replace objects while maintaining meaningful relationships to the project. Reuse should save work without restricting design.

Library

The library should make accumulated knowledge easier to use. People should be able to find, understand, organize, reuse, and maintain the things their studio depends on without turning library management into a separate occupation. Shared resources should become more valuable as they are used rather than more difficult to control.

Worksheets

Worksheets should provide a direct way to see and work with structured project information. They should remain connected to the project so that editing information and editing the design are not separate realities. Tabular work should have the familiarity and flexibility people expect from spreadsheets without creating another source of truth.

Command Line

The command line should give experienced people a faster path through Corvus without creating a separate way of working. Commands should complement direct manipulation, remain visible and understandable, and allow people to move fluidly between keyboard and graphical interaction. As fluency grows, Corvus should reward it with greater speed and precision.

Collaborating

Collaborating should feel like a natural part of working in Corvus, not a separate mode or feature. People should be able to work together in the same project while remaining focused on their own work, seeing what others are doing when it matters without unnecessary interruption. Corvus should reduce the coordination required to work together rather than create more of it.

Rendering

Rendering should be part of designing, not merely a process performed after designing. People should be able to understand material, light, atmosphere, depth, and space while they work and increase fidelity when the purpose demands it. Moving between designing and seeing should require as little interruption as possible.

Presenting

The project itself should be capable of becoming the presentation. People should be able to compose, sequence, annotate, and communicate their work without repeatedly exporting it into another environment simply to tell its story. Presentation should remain connected to the living project so that the act of presenting does not create another version to maintain.

Printing

Printed and fixed-format output remains fundamental to professional practice. People should be able to compose, inspect, and produce drawings with confidence that the result will communicate what they intended. Preparing output should not require fighting a separate publishing system bolted onto the design environment.

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