Chapter 12. Design and Documentation

What we'll cover:

The role of diagrams in the design phase

Why, when, and how to develop blueprints and wireframes, the two most common types of IA diagrams

How to map and inventory your site's content

Content models and controlled vocabularies for connecting and managing granular content within your site

Ways to enhance your collaboration with other members of the design team

Style guides for capturing your past decisions and guiding your future ones

When you cross the bridge from research and strategy into design, the landscape shifts quite dramatically. The emphasis moves from process to deliverables, as your clients and colleagues expect you to move from thinking and talking to actually producing a clear, well-defined information architecture.

This can be an uneasy transition. You must relinquish the white lab coat of the researcher, leave behind the ivory tower of the strategist, and forge into the exposed territory of creativity and design. As you commit your ideas to paper, it can be scary to realize there's no going back. You are now actively shaping what will become the user experience. Your fears and discomforts will be diminished if you've had the time and resources to do the research and develop a strategy; if you're pushed straight into design (as is too often the case), you'll be entering the uneasy realm of intuition and gut instinct.

It's difficult to write about design because the work in this phase is so strongly defined by context and influenced by tacit knowledge. You may be working closely with a graphic designer to create a small web site from the ground up. Or you may be building a controlled vocabulary and site index as part of an enterprise-level redesign that involves more than a hundred people. The design decisions you make and the deliverables you produce will be informed by the total sum of your experience.

In short, we're talking about the creative process. The information architect paints on a vast, complex, and ever-changing canvas. Often, the best way to teach art is through the time-tested practice of show-and-tell. So, in this chapter, we'll use work products and deliverables to tell the story about what the information architect does during the design phase.

Before we dive in, here's a caveat. Although this chapter focuses on deliverables, process is as important during design as it is during research and strategy. This means that the techniques covered previously should be applied to these later phases, albeit with more concrete and detailed artifactsranging from vocabularies to wireframes to working prototypesbeing tested.

And another caveat: for reasons beyond your control, you'll occasionallyeven frequentlyfind yourself in the uncomfortable situation of bypassing research and strategy altogether, skipping headlong into the abyss of design. Deliverables are especially critical in this context; they're anchors that, by forcing the team to pause, capture, and review its work, regulate and moderate an out-of-control project. You can also use deliverables to unmask design problems and force the project to backtrack to research and design tasks that should have been handled much earlier.