- 1.How Formform thinks
- 2.Getting in
- 3.Starting a project and inviting clients
- 4.What your clients experience
- 5.While the interviews run
- 6.Navigating the workspace
- 7.Understanding the household
- 8.Your first themes
- 9.Making decisions inside a theme
- 10.Working across themes
- 11.Pressure-testing a theme
- 12.Producing and defending the brief
Your first themes
Once enough interview material has arrived, Formform proposes a first set of themes rather than leaving you looking at a blank workspace. You can take them, ignore them, or write your own.
Themes get suggested
You don’t start from nothing. Once there’s enough evidence and no themes yet, a first set is drafted from the interviews and listed in the sidebar, each carrying an AI badge that marks it as suggested rather than chosen.
Theme: A named branch of the design you are exploring, defined by the evidence pointing at it and the decisions you have made in it.
Sidebar · the first time Themes has anything in it
No briefs yet
What has and has not happened
Look inside one before you commit
Click a suggested theme and it opens on the right, showing what it’s made of and the client evidence behind it, so you can decide whether it’s worth following before you commit.
Detail panel · a suggested theme
The Quiet Core
7 evidence
Evidence
7She cannot take a client call while the saw is running.
He is out in the garage weekday evenings, 7:30 to 10.
She practises the piano at four, after school.
The detached garage shares no wall with the house.
No Moves section, and so no conflicts. Both arrive the moment you decide something.
Make your own
The suggestions are a starting point, not the set. Use the + beside the Themes heading, or just ask in the chat, to add a theme nothing proposed. You’ll usually see something they missed.
In the chat
Arriving, dropping things, and the first thirty seconds inside the door.
From the sidebar
New Theme
Source themes
Optionally seed from existing themes
Why it proposes anything at all
All 12 partsThe hardest moment isn’t the interviews. It’s the morning after, with four hours of transcript and no idea where to put your hands. A first set of themes isn’t meant to be clever. It’s a cut you argue with, and that’s faster than starting from nothing.