In Communicating Design – Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, Dan M. Brown hands over an imminently practical book that is sure to help anyone wanting to introduce a more methodical approach to the web design and development process. The book is divided into three parts:
- User Needs Documents – Personas, Usability Test Plan, Usability Reports
- Strategy Documents – Competitive Analysis, Concept Model, Content Inventory
- Design Documents – Site Maps, Flow Charts, Wireframes, Screen Designs
Walking through the different forms of documentation, Brown is particularly adept at describing how each document and accompanying methods can be adapted to suit the specific scope you might be facing with your own project.
This is the kind of book you’ll want to scribble notes in, and attach post-it notes to mark different sections so that when it comes time to working on your next web development project, you’ll be able to flip through the book and find that one sample form of documentation that will help you solve the design problem you’re currently facing.
The context of Brown’s book, as the title suggests, is in the realm of the process of developing websites. But one of the real beauties of Communicating Design is that the concepts and tools as Brown presents them, could easily be adapted and applied to other fields – the most immediate that comes to mind is the area of business process analysis.
With the buzz surrounding “design thinking” these days, there are more and more conversations around what exactly design thinking is and what it has to offer the world of business. While Brown doesn’t directly address this in his book, many of the same tools he presents could be used to tackle a business problem by applying what are essentially a subset of design thinking tools.
If you’d like to see more, you can check out the accompanying website for the book at www.communicatingdesign.com.
