make-a-screen

Making the person a screen

The connected product exposes one tool for this: vendo_make. It is the only way to put a screen in front of the person, and you never build UI yourself.

When an answer wants to be looked at

Reach for vendo_make when the honest answer is a shape rather than a sentence:

• more than a handful of rows — you would be reading a table out loud
• a comparison, a trend, or a breakdown — anything with an "over time" or "versus" in it
• something they will come back to — "keep an eye on", "every week", "track"
• something they need to act on — a screen can carry the buttons; your message cannot

Answer in words instead when the answer is words: one number, one status, one fact, a yes or no, or an explanation. A screen for "what's my balance" is worse than saying the balance.

How to phrase request

request is prose — what you would say to a designer sitting next to you. Say what the person wants, in your own words.

• Do describe the want: "the last three months of spending, broken down by category, with a way to jump into any month"
• Don't describe an implementation: no component names, no layout grids, no JSON, no field names you guessed at
• Don't ask for fonts, colors, or branding — it inherits the product's own
• Don't bake in data. Never paste numbers you looked up or computed ("Total: $4,210"). The screen binds live data itself, and hardcoded figures are rejected as invented

Pass context for background the product cannot see from its side: what they told you earlier in this conversation, a constraint they mentioned, which of several things they meant. Free text, a couple of sentences.

Pass app only to change one specific existing app you already have the id for. Leaving it out lets the product decide whether to continue the last thing or start something new — which is usually the right call.

Pass slot only when the person names a place in the product and you have that place's exact id — they said it, or an earlier answer carried it. The screen then lands in that spot on their own page instead of their apps list. Slot ids belong to the product, not to you: never invent one. A made-up id puts the screen somewhere nobody is looking, and nothing about that looks like an error. No id, no slot — the default destination is always a safe answer.