Process: Deliverables

Within many companies, the use of wireframes in user experience design can be a contentious issue. People typically think of wireframes simply as artifacts designers create when generating design concepts, then later discard. Why not create a design artifact that is not disposable, but instead, one your team can convert to actual production code? Is this Holy Grail of the design process a good idea? Is it even possible? Or does the answer depend on the project, the team, and its agility? This first part in a two-part series takes an in-depth look at the process of converting wireframes to code. Read More

When it comes to modern theater, stage directions—the descriptive text that appears within brackets in a script—are an important piece of the puzzle. They speak for the playwright when he is not there. They provide details about how the playwright has imagined the environment and atmosphere. They describe critical physical aspects of the characters and settings. Stage directions can also be critical in dictating the intended tempo and rhythm of the piece. Whether they establish a production’s overall tone or elucidate particular actions of characters, stage directions help tell the complete story that is in the playwright’s mind. Stage directions accomplish all of this, using a simple convention that structurally separates them from the actual story.

Tennessee Williams, the playwright of A Streetcar Named Desire, strives to give a play “the spirit of life” through his stage directions. Read the following snippet from the opening of Scene 1, and you’ll find it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t achieve that goal. Read More

In the summer of 2007, the Society for Technical Communication (STC) initiated a collaborative effort, combining representatives from academe and industry, to define the Technical Communication Body of Knowledge (TCBOK). I got involved in that project in January 2008, when a group of us started working asynchronously online to lay out the foundations. Very early, we identified a core set of stakeholders whom we thought would constitute the primary users of this Body of Knowledge. To understand how these users would access and use the Body of Knowledge, we decided to create personas that would let us envision what type of structure it should have and communicate our findings to the leadership and members of STC. This column describes the personas we created, as well as a surprising discovery I made when I later visited the prototype that the team had created for these personas. Read More