KnowledgeWeave

Dan Brown’s Communicating Design contains a wealth of examples of the ten main types of documentation that can inform a web site design.  Brown begins by describing three key user needs documents (personas, usability test plans, and usability reports), then moves on to discussing strategy documents (competitive analyses, concept models, and content inventories) and ends with a detailed analysis of four types of design documents (site maps, flow charts, wireframes and screen designs).

Along the way he provides rich discussions of the different approaches you might take to each document based on your particular audience and situation.  For example, he notes that a more narrative-based style might be more appropriate for presenting personas when your audience consists of stakeholders who are not particularly concerned about the technical details of user needs.  On the other hand, a “table” or “quick and dirty” approach might work better for designers who need an easy way to compare designs to user needs, or when your project doesn’t afford much time for user research.  He even provides sample layouts for each of these presentation styles.

Brown is particularly good on wireframes (both the HTML and paper varieties), providing rich descriptions of different layers you can add to your wireframes to address specific challenges.  This section also includes a recipe for “pain-free” wireframe creation and thoughtful tips for presenting wireframes to different types of audiences (e.g., business leads, engineers or visual designers).  His “They Say > You Say” suggestions for redirecting wireframe conversations when they start to go astray are priceless.

My one complaint about the book is that it’s surprisingly wordy: I would have preferred more annotated examples in place of some of the longer descriptive sections.  You may prefer (like me) to spare your eyes the strain of reading the 339 pages of smallish Bembo text by scanning it instead—but then stopping to dive in more deeply to the more compelling bits as you see fit.  Despite its occasional long-windedness however I would highly recommend “Communicating Design,” and suspect it will be one of those super-handy cookbooks you’ll find yourself returning to again and again.