SIGIA-L Mail Archives: Re: SIGIA-L: deliverables
Re: SIGIA-L: deliverables
From: Betsy Martens (bigshoulders_at_mindspring.com)
Date: Mon Apr 30 2001 - 14:04:25 EDT
Finished: just enough and not a bit more. Flippant? Not if you consider who
the audience for the documentation is. Is this the client's first view of
your team's plan for their site: its structure and navigation and
functionality? Then the documentation needs not only to communicate the
proposal but to excite your audience with the possibilities, because what
you're doing is painting a picture of the future for them. Is it
documentation for the Broadvision developers? Just the facts, clearly
stated, would probably be sufficient.
One think we haven't talked about directly on this list is the role of
excitement and awe in our presentations. It's not just about the
documentation. The reason we want to make our documents beautiful is because
this serves the goal of good communication. If the basic product is sound,
good presentation design plays a reinforcing role. Needless to say, no
amount of pizzazz will cover up a fundamentally bad product, at least not
for any sustained period of scrutiny.
As for the meaning of beautiful: yeeks! I'll take as my frame of reference
the very tasty and appealing deliverables on the wall at the CarbonIQ social
hour, which Christina shared with us over the weekend:
http://carboniq.com/events/cocktailhour/april/
but that's another discussion entirely.
I agree with Adam, Beki, and Leo, all of whom said, in a sense: Iterations?
Get used to 'em! Which is why IAs who are also power users with a strong
sense of design are worth their weight in gold. IMHO.
Betsy
on 4/30/01 9:39 PM, Andrea Tanzi at atanzi_at_azurian.com wrote:
Betsy Martens wrote:
> They need to see it more "finished" in order to realize which things they want
> to change.
I was wondering how finish is that... my experience with deliverables (which
until now have been sitemaps and wireframes -but I've been learning latetly
that there are flowchart and storyboards that I don't really know what they
look like) has been from doing them in Quark and trying to produce the final
design (as in the way they would be organized in each pageview) to 3 columns
(one for functionality, one for content and one for navigation) bareing only
text.
So what happened was that with the first type the designer did the final
design very much like the wireframe (in the order of things) but I found out
that sometimes it didn't work as I planned it and in the last one I had to
sit with the designer explaining verbaly and even drawing what I meant on
each wireframe.
So I guess the question here is... what are the most common deliverables in
IA, how are they suppose to look like more or less and what are they suppose
to show and to whom in the building process?
Sorry for my english but I speak spanish as my first language!!!
Andrea
atanzi_at_azurian.com
Andrea Tanzi
Information Architect
Azurian
www.azurian.com
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