No Cost for Culture

Given that we’ve been working on different types of documentation like site diagrams, user flows, and wireframes, I’ve been thinking about and researching different ways of representing these deliverables.

My project Finabler is a web application that I imagine being interactive and drag-and-droppy, but also retaining many menu-structures and functionalities that are more common in desktop applications, and I’m still kind of at a loss as to how I’ll represent things that are functional, but not pages unto themselves.

Anyway, looking through the software prototyping book for our prototyping class, I came across a dependency diagram, which I thought was a great way to get ideas down for user/task flow and how things relate to one another. (sorry I can’t find a good example online - check out the book, if you’ve got it!)

I also found this ye olde User Task Model that I thought was interesting, in a holistic way. It helps to put our scenarios into action in a way others will understand.

And a couple months ago I came across Todd Warfel’s Task Analysis Grid, which he shares the template for on his site. It uses scenarios, tasks, and subtasks to outline how the functional requirements of a system will be met. He also puts a human face on it and includes a term I love, and I think it says so much - Pain Points! What are we trying to fix? Anyway, this document seems like a great way to streamline our documentation.

Finally, over at Boxes and Arrows, Andres Zapata talks about using guided wireframes in powerpoint to tell the story of how a rich internet application will function.

What methods have you found to be useful?