Friday, April 24, 2009

Concept Cheat Sheet

(as always, click to make bigger)

I want to share this very interesting deliverable that a designer I am working with produced. We are working on a redesign of the Big Brothers Big Sisters: Columbia Northwest site as a volunteer project through the AMA Community Outreach program (if you have skills you should check it out and do what Obama would do)

I had already done a very prescriptive wireframe when the designer joined our team and the next step we thought was needed as a mood board to get the visual design process going. In addition to the typlical mood board that experiments with type, color, imagery and tone he put together the above piece to demonstrate how the ideas in my wireframe had been realized on other sites. Kind of "concept cheat sheet."

Kinda cool. Still waiting to see how it actually works with client. I could see it being very useful or kinda confusing. But client aside it's an good communication tool for our internal team. Nice job Damon!

Have you done anything like this before?

Here's the original wire. If your into that kinda thing.

3 comments:

Damon May 15, 2009 at 11:40 AM  

Thanks for the kudos, so far so good!

Unknown May 18, 2009 at 2:45 PM  

You guys are on to something here. I love this deliverable for a bunch of reasons:

1. It’s collaborative, bringing the designer or design into the information architecture stage.
2. The graphical call outs will help bridge the gap between the cold and boney IA and what stakeholders might or might not be able to visualize from a traditional wireframe document, flushing out stakeholder or user preferences and biases earlier in the process.
3. It’ll help manage stakeholders who aren’t used to wireframes yet and want to rush into comps.
3. It's a great way to share early thinking on form-factor w/o being limited to just the cold boney, IA and wireframe stage.
4. It’s a Tufte-worthy execution that is info-dense and marries high-fidelity interface ideas right where your audience needs them.
5. It’s a Bill Buxton-worthy execution by exploring several ideas early on rather than investing in only one idea.

I like it so much that I think I'll give you a Picasso-like compliment by stealing it. Great stuff.

tyesha May 18, 2009 at 6:17 PM  

Elena, you are a super awesome commenter. I love your point especially 4 & 5. Exploring multiple ideas early is so important but often than not it doesn't happen and you get nailed down to the first "good" idea you have.

Thanks!

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