Content and flow – isn’t that what it's all about?

It's been a while since we took a hard look at the initial stages of interactive design. Like other things this has changed radically. Defining content used to be the forgotten area unless you were working on interactive training where the outline and detailed design phases used to dominate. But defining the content for all types of interactivity has become a major phase of design. Now we have information architects (IA) who organise content and flow of a website, based on some principles that can be articulated, that have been derived through evidence gathering. (Martin Belam, Inside the Guardian Blog, Feb 2010.)

As well as information architects, jobs have asked for data architects, business architects, solution architects, technical architects and so on. Yes, I hear you, what about user experience (UX), where does this fit in? This has had an explosion of people flocking round the candle flame of UX as supply has out-stripped demand for the skills. Cennydd Bowles decries the watering down of his chosen profession and warns of the demise of UX in his 2011 Summit presentation at Colorado, The rise and fall of User Experience. It's a well thought through and heart-felt article that's worth a look. He comes down on the side of "obliquity", creating personal value, and long-term goals and quality rather than being enslaved to the measurable, quantitative, short-term goals of business and usability that dominate the profession now.

Let's move on to the tools employed by IA/UX people to define and refine the content and flow of interactive applications. How many of these do you recognise and when might they prove useful? Card Sorting, site maps, wire frames, user journeys, funnel diagrams, content audits, task models, prototyping, and so on. If you haven't recognised many of these tools perhaps you can get your company to buy a few IA/UX books or Kindle formats. There are many available that get supposedly good reviews. You can check these out at Amazon such as:

• 100 things every designer needs to know about people: what makes them tick (Voices that matter) by Susan Weinschenk, April 2011, Pub: New Riders.
• or, Communicating the User Experience: A practical Guide for Creating Useful UX Documentation by Richard Craddick and Steve Cable, Nov 2011. Pub: John Wiley & Sons.

So IA and UX seem to be in a state of flux despite being skillsets that are in demand. But from my point of view, anything that has put the spotlight on the initial design of content and flow has given tremendous value to iMedia. We need to heed Cennydd's perspective though and learn from the master so that these invaluable disciplines continue to add lasting value.

Project Life Cycles and Project Management

This used to be a simple question - not providing simple answers though - of understanding the planning, the design, the build and the implementation phases of a project. These underpinned a company's approach to developing projects. They were based heavily on IT inspired phases of software development as this was the closest to interactive media development.

So for the early years, the Waterfall approach dominated and for many this approach still does. If you need reminding about the Waterfall life cycle take a look at SoftDevTeam's site and their Life Cycle Selector software tool description. We don't know anything about the tool itself, by the way, but the diagrams and summary advantages and disadvantages descriptions of the spiral, waterfall, incremental, evolutionary prototyping, rapid application development, and V-shaped models of software life cycles , are illuminating. Some are new for us but then we've not been in pure software development.

Check out more definitions of models at Business E-solutions.

The planned and designed inherent Waterfall approach is iterated by Alex Baker recently in Life Cycle Stages of Website Design Process, but it is dependent on the client stating the business goal and requirements – something that proves pretty hard most of the time.
Another take on a life cycle comes from Jason Montague, An Agile Project Lifecycle, and he has a visual denoting the process. He also explains difficulties he's met in organisations when trying to explain the usefulness of using Agile processes. Remember that Agile tried to address the 'refining' of requirements that often occurs during interactive projects. The strict Waterfall software approach did not allow such changes and caused conflict between client and developer, so Agile techniques may help overcome some of the difficulties.

There are masses of Waterfall versus Agile debates still going on in cyberspace if you care to Google it, but few solid answers about the life cycle of an interactive project whether website, mobile, iTV or whatever. Shame, I'll keep looking periodically though and let you know if I find any answers. Meanwhile, how is anyone managing any project!