Documentation is important in any line of work, but it is even more important in the world of web design. I recently finished reading Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan M. Brown. This book takes you through the proces of preparing and presenting all kinds of project documentation from writeframes and sitemaps to flow charts and user profiles.
The style of the book is not really to say that you need to be doing this or that, but offer guidelines on how to create the documents that you may need for your particular project. The book is split into three parts, each covering a particular type of documentation: User Needs, Strategy and Design. The User Needs section covers Personas and Usability Test Plans and Reports. The Strategy section talks about Competitive Analyses, Concept Models and Content Inventories. The final section, Design, includes Site Maps, Flowcharts, Wireframes and Site Designs.
As a designer, I have used most, if not all, of the documents mentioned in the Design group, at one time or another in my career. I wasn’t as familiar with Personas, and that was what really interested me. We always talk about the kind of users that are going to be using our sites, but it is usually post-design and informal. Personas actually take you through the process of creating users for your site, how they will use it, and what to expect from it.
To quote the author:
Good personas make everyone happy. They give design teams an effective, accessible way to descrbie user needs and stakeholders a common language for talking about their customers. Personas mean that no one on your team will have to say “I think our users want this” or “If my mom were a customer she would want that”. They paint a multidimensional picture of the audience in terms that allow design teams to evaluate the effectiveness of their designs.
Wireframes are another area where this book really helps. Even if you have been doing them for years, there are bound to be bits and pieces of information that you can take away from this book. The author does a great job of talking about everything from what kind of content you can and should use to how much information should be presented in the wireframe. One section I found extremely useful is how to present wireframes to a client, sell them on the idea without seeing colors and images, and how to avoid pitfalls in this early stage of the project.
What Dan Brown has done is taken all of these tools that we hear about and put then into a single volume that could be considered THE source to consult when creating your project documentation, whether you need everything in the book, or just bits and pieces.