To address Gabby's question, a very small web-sized selection of bits of my own projects can be found at my site:
http://www.orbitnet.com/ And though it's from 2005, a slideshow and accompanying set of slides giving very high-level overviews of a selection of projects can be found at: Text: http://orbitnet.com/iasummit2005/ Slides: http://www.orbitnet.com/iasummit2005/iasummit2005.html ...though these examples were not aimed at laying out a reductionist process, but rather distilling some lessons learned along the way from each of these projects. For some of the documentation samples included in those slides, it's important to note that there are often hundreds of similar pages that would've gone into the development, and many more that serve as part of the implemenation documentation. As for how clients are approached, many project begin by actually doing a short but intense project to give an overview of the phases that will comprise the project. The teams I've worked with (in consulting roles) always create very detailed, often design-filled proposals. We've even done first draft style guides to show the approach we will take more fully in a project. I've seen a lot of text-based design proposals, and I've also had a number of clients from large consumer electronic corporations comment that they were really convinced by both the past work we've shown and, in cases where we did it, our proposal's quick overview designs. Nobody I'm familiar with has ever simply asked a client to trust them, without given them a great deal of confidence of what they've done, and what they will do and deliver. Ironically, I can hardly count the times I've been involved in design projects that followed some former design consultancy that the client was unhappy with, and I know that some of these involved large teams and quite a bit of research and process. Apparently some of these have difficulty in translating all of that research and process into an actual implementable design. At least that's what I hear from some clients. And I actually did lay out the three primary activities that make up the RED projects I and others have worked on: I'll repeat them here again, as some evidently missed them: 1) Initial information gathering, stakeholder interviews and discussions, and review and analysis of existing bodies of information and solutions/products/systems/services. In RED, however, this is done very rapidly, and filtered through what's already known, or been done previously, by the RED designer/team. 2) Rapid prototyping (this will vary among RED practitioners). My team uses extensive paper prototyping, flows, layouts, and pattern diagrams, iterating these to quickly explore interrelationships and refine effective solutions. 3) Produce implementable specifications that engineers can implement in a high-fidelity manner (blueprints), rather than spend too much of the limited time producing interactive prototypes and limited documentation (that engineers must analyze and try to reduce/reproduce as an implementation. These phases and their embodiments and examples are *best and most easily* discussed within the context of a review of real documentation, rather than through a run down of a reductionist list. In proposals we describe in detail how these three activities will be conducted (iteratively) and what the specific deliverables will be and at what times. We use past project documentation to give new clients a sense for the form and depth of this work. It's not magic, nor mythical, nor anything other than simply real work. It's very much enough structure and process to give a client a sense of how the development will proceed. And this design work is almost always very closely coordinated with the client and in some cases carried on collaboratively (we've experienced many variations on both). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=37626 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
