October 20th, 2011
The other night, I was up till quite late reading up on a popular portal solution. In the beginning, I thought everything made sense, and I was pretty happy that I “got it”. But after a while, probably about two hrs in, found myself googling or going to wikipedia to find the definitions of every other technical word, even the terms I thought I understood at the start. I found myself getting more and more confused about the thing I was reading. I was unsure of myself. This was because some generic terms you and I would use were taken to be part of the systems “default” term and concept and had given them their own definitions.
I don’t know about you, but I think terminology and jargon sessions need to be part of the process of any web project, particularly large ones. With new and different roles in the development lifecycle of software/online products, and different companies playing those different roles for one client, it becomes crucial to spend some time on being on the same page with everyone. If you don’t take time to flesh out the terminology to be used for that project it can create a sense of distrust and second-guessing amongst project members from different teams especially between the tech and the design team.
Since we all come from IT and read similar books and blogs, we tend to use the same words but interpret and use them slightly differently. This often leads to a debate on semantics. But in the end, we are all probably talking about the same thing.
Communicating design is one of the key skills a designer needs to have and part of the design process. I believe this must include a communication or explanation of the terms you use and the naming convention you will be using for your documentation for that project.
The benefits? If you have everyone understanding what you mean, people (like your clients and stakeholders) can give you better feedback and input without getting stuck on what something means. In fact, people want to understand more of these things, which means they are more curious, more involved and more aware of the process and are therefore less in the dark about what they are paying for. This can only lead to a successful project and more importantly the design.
February 23rd, 2009
I’ve been asked a few times by friends and clients to write up the steps I take to produce the design documents that we give them. This is my attempt at putting a process or approach together. I think these constitute what we usually do at Lushai. I will update and refine it as I work on more projects. I’ll even put in a diagram.
So, here goes…
Lushai’s approach to projects is based on transparency, adaptability to clients’ requirements and quality. Our approach to design is based on business drivers but focused on your end-users’ needs. Our goal is to facilitate the communication and interaction between you and your end-users and customers.
Our design process involves the following components:
We start with carrying out design research which means we dig inside to understand your requirements more in-depth to establish and clarify business goals and objectives. We immerse ourselves into your business processes, objects and information to understand relationships and identify problems and opporutnities. We look at your target users and their needs, to establish what they need from you including other online experiences that may be compelling to them.
This activity helps us identify interactions and information that will support the overall experience from using your online systems, services and spaces.
Once we understand your business and user requirements, we will put together concepts and start visualising how your business will reach out to your customers and users online. We will develop personas or composites of your users if required, sitemaps or the logical and hierarchical structure of information within your website, key page layouts or templates, models for interaction and navigation. This is also where we develop the visual, colour and typographic styles for your online presence if you require.
After agreeing upon the overall concept and strategy of information and interaction of your website or application, we can start defining the detail elements. This is where we specify the smallest button and placement of information, what they look like and how they will behave upon user interaction. This is a very iterative process as we evaluate and refine along the way, while you get to see how the designs evolve.
Once the specifications are signed off, we can start developing the user interface using HTML and CSS. We provide validated and clean HTML and CSS files that can be handed over to the developers who will build the website. Lushai does not do web development. We provide clean HTML & CSS files that can be easily implemented by any software developer. We design with our own industry standard based CSS frameworks and we can work with the developer’s own frameworks if necessary.
Lushai’s process at it’s core follows a user centered design methodolody. This means we put the user at the centre of your proposition.
Some outputs of this are on Slideshare from work I did, while I was at Provoke for one of my favorite clients.