The design activities and deliverables that we produce for web apps depend on the value to the company of an optimized design vs. an average design. That doesn%u2019t mean we turn out crap unless required to do otherwise. It means the background work we do to build understanding prior to creating the deliverables, and the depth of detail in the deliverables, have to be worth the cost in time and resources.
While I agree that some of the production values in the deliverables serve more of a marketing or political function, I think the contents of design deliverables are also very important in the same way that a blueprint is important. For a dog house, maybe a pencil sketch will do. For a high-rise, a room full of architectural specifications are required. In a web app we designed for GE that was used at all levels between practitioner and VP, we documented the following: - User interviews at all levels - Audience segmentation and user archetype profiles - User interface requirements for each segment - Task flow diagrams - Interaction modes with mini-screen flow diagrams - Organizational structure - Navigation system - Concept wireframes - Functional specifications with screen states and error handling - Design templates To be effective, the web app design documentation you produce has to fit in with the development process, and you need to time design deliverables to be inputs to the development cycles. The details in the documentation should be greater when design and development are separated functionally or organizationally. That was the case in the web app above. The dev team said the documentation helped them to develop the app very efficiently. A six sigma study of the app after release showed significant ROI of the design process we followed. Paul Bryan Usography (www.usography.com) Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/uxexperts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=46048 ________________________________________________________________ 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
