Deliverables
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Personas and the Role of Design Documentation
by Andrew Hinton | [23 comments]
Andrew Hinton digs into the origins of the persona and reflects on how business uses (or misuses) design documentation. more...
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Building a Data-Backed Persona
by Andrea Wiggins | [14 comments]
While the imaginary persona is helpful in the design process, a data-backed persona lends even more depth and focus to the development process. Andrea Wiggins reveals some effective ways to back up your personas with data easily available today. more...
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PDF Prototypes: Mistakenly Disregarded and Underutilized
by Kyle Pero Soucy | [32 comments]
Creating clickable PDF prototypes for new designs is a valuable tool that is often overlooked and underutilized. Kyle Pero Soucy demonstrates how we can replicate most interactive design elements without investing a lot of time and effort. more...
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Interactive Prototypes with PowerPoint
by Maureen Kelly | [18 comments]
Many designers use MS PowerPoint to conceptualize wireframes and get buy-in on project direction. Maureen Kelly shows us how to bring those same artifacts to life as an interactive prototype that allows you to validate the design at many levels. more...
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Practical Plans for Accessible Architectures
by Frances Forman | [13 comments]
Accessible information architecture builds a bridge between planning, design, and development. Frances Forman gives us a place to start thinking more deeply about how information can be structured and transformed to make user interaction more flexible for everyone. more...
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Faceted Feature Analysis
by Adam Polansky | [22 comments]
Adam Polansky tells us about how “Faceted Feature Analysis” takes the subjective needs of stakeholders and blends them with objective constraints in a way that ensures all points of view are fairly considered. more...
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Straight From the Horse's Mouth with Dan Brown
by Bill Wetherell | [4 comments]
Tom Wailes' interviews Dan Brown about how pushing the envelope in small ways can be the best path to innovation in many corporate and public sector projects. (Part 4 in a series) more...
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Comics: Not just for laughs!
by Rebekah Sedaca | [21 comments]
Using comics is a novel means of communicating complex design concepts. There is has been a lot of talk about it recently, but it this medium only reserved for artists? Rebekah Sedaca decided to give it a try. It worked and she's outlined her process and tools that you may be able to use. more...
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Content Analysis Heuristics
by Fred Leise | [9 comments]
Many Web professionals consider content inventories critical parts of most projects. Are there certain specific things to look for during a content inventory? Fred Leise definitely thinks so. He proposes a set of content analysis heuristics and discusses how to utilize each one. more...
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Real Wireframes Get Real Results
by Stephen Turbek | [34 comments]
Information architects, afraid to step on designers' toes, may actually render wireframes unusable. Stephen Turbek talks about Verizon, the similarities between wireframes and iPods, and how to get real. more...
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Know Your Place
by Nathan Curtis | [10 comments]
Popular wireframing tools allow for reuse of repeated elements: change a centralized module once and have it update across all your screens. Nathan Curtis offers practical tips for increasing wireframing efficiency in this story. more...
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Storyboarding Rich Internet Applications with Visio
by Bill Scott | [29 comments]
The recent rise in more powerful technologies that provide richer user experiences online has presented us with a challenge. As designers, we are moving from from designing for "PIAs" to designing for "RIAs." Does our documentation style change with the technology? Will our standard ways do the job? more...
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Visio Glue: Not For Sniffing - Special Deliverable #13
by Dan Brown | [4 comments]
Spend any time with Visio and you'll find yourself wondering how glue works. In the real world, it's pretty straightforward: put glue between two things and they'll stick. Although glue is used for sticking shapes together in Visio, the metaphor ends there. more...
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Toggling Shapes in Visio: Special Deliverable #12
by Dan Brown | [6 comments]
This article will expand upon the Visio techniques presented in the last Special Deliverable and will build on them, showing how to create a widget that can be toggled between two states. more...
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Wireframe Annotations in Visio : Special Deliverable #11
by Dan Brown | [18 comments]
Few information architects tap the full power of Visio. For the IA, Visio is a means to an end—a mechanism for capturing some ideas on paper before they are transformed into graphics, HTML, and code. more...
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Site Diagrams: Mapping an Information Space
by Jason Withrow | [23 comments]
Site diagrams can be quite helpful in answering all kinds of hard questions. How to create the right diagram became a personal challenge for Jason Withrow. He shares his story through tips and techniques... more...
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Representing Content and Data in Wireframes: Special Deliverable #10
by Dan Brown | [10 comments]
Visio practically groaned as I opened the wireframes for my current project, which were in something like the twentieth revision. It was the usual story—poorly defined requirements and business rules—and my project folder was fast becoming the poster child for Feature Creep Flu. more...
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Deliverables and Methods: Special Deliverable #8
by Dan Brown | [3 comments]
To date this column has focused on how to make deliverables more effective, either through their content or through the tools to create them. For this issue, I would like to explore the relationship between deliverables and methodology. Unfortunately, this calls for a definition of IA methodology, which may challenge the definition of IA as the hardest question in our field. more...
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Six Tips for Improving Your Design Documentation
by Ryan Olshavsky | [4 comments]
Good organization, complete information, and clear writing are, of course, key to the success of any design document, but there are some other, less-obvious techniques you can use to make your documents more readable and understandable. Here are a few of them. more...
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Writing Smart Annotations
by Dan Saffer | [3 comments]
Now that you've figured out the navigation, placed the content, and figured out page flows, it's time to explain just what exactly that collection of “Lorum ipsum” greeking, HTML widgets, and X-ed out boxes are, how they work, and how they meet the site goals. more...