SV: [Sigia-l] RE: Notes from IA/UX discussion on CMS

[Gunnar Langemark]

> > Care to describe in more detail (or refer to examples) how you
> enhanced your
> > deliverables (or created new ones) to document the added layers of
> > information?
>
> Speaking for myself: prototype.
>
> Best,
>
> Ziya

Ziya is right as most of the time. I turned to prototyping as in "HTML
mockup" and adding functionality to Visio diagram's - but there were other
things that I tried to do. Here's a (not really) short account:

Eighteen months ago I still worked a standard visual vocabulary in the
organization I worked for which was very much build to suit a static
structure with html pages. These diagram's had to be enhanced. I found that
Jesse James Garrets visual vocabulary ( http://www.jjg.net/ia/visvocab/ )
fit my needs well. Technical people felt comfortable with this notation, but
I had some problems with my PM, who was very young, and had a habit of
"counting boxes" when estimating. Fortunately she was taking a course in Use
Cases at the time, and was open to suggestions. We went through the
diagram's, and I split up the diagram's to visualize

a) "standard" structure, (this gave her an insight to the "place" of most
content)

b) use flow - with arrows and all (this reflected her use cases - which you
can learn about here:
http://www.rational.com/products/whitepapers/finalTP171.jsp - I warn you:It
can be overdone!),

c) Content. Content needed another treatment. Content must be understood as
structured documents. This is much easier to understand for a librarian than
for a web designer. What happened to me two years ago, and again with a
client this summer, was that some people did not get, that the principal
design that they sign-off to, cannot be "trimmed" for a specific document,
unless you build a new design template for that document, which is a bad
habit in my opinion.
Content creators - copy writers and editors - have a much more direct
approach. Defining the structural elements of a documents is part of their
professional skill set.
I guess that there's room for XML DTD standards development here. I know
that this is going on in e-learning.

I have promised myself to build more client education into the process where
I work now. This would do much to avoid the pain of bridging the
expectations gap late in a project.

Unfortunately I have not been able to take with me samples of this work, and
for the past year in my new job I have not done so much structure
diagramming.

So much for diagram's. Visio is excellent in my eyes for prototyping this
kind of stuff.

Now comes wireframes: The problem has been the same. Old habits made us do
wireframes of whole pages. This is not enough. We found that building a box
type templating system was the way to go. Nowadays - when I actually mostly
work with existing systems, I would much prefer to build examples of layout
and functionality in a set of prototypes - and let clients decide on
functionality and box layout from such sessions. Visual design must be done
in Photoshop still - that is the way designers work. But designers have
become much more used to the way visual design fits into a CMS project, and
know that they must come up with very stable and not too delicate design -
that will allow for different content - large amounts of text, small amounts
of text, images and so on.
I may be a little unfair to graphics designers now, but as with any
profession there are the swarming wannabe's who do not have the insights and
experience to step back and learn. In my experience you would not let the
junior and uneducated, but talented graphics artist work alone on a CMS
project without very close supervision. He would be tempted to do design the
old way - and trim every page of content.
Wireframes should be done - and also boxes!

With content management do not forget that you have an administration
system - on some project you will need to design workflows, and interaction
design might be part of that. It depends on the system.

I have worked with a couple of small to midscale Scandinavian content
management system such as Synkron, Web500 and Tangora.
I also have worked with proprietary technology, and I have been involved in
developing one CMS system for Axapta - which is a Danish multi-language ERP
system - recently acquired by Microsoft. When not at work I spend time
building my own little website on Drupal, which is excellent for this kind
of work. But Drupal hardly qualifies as a real content management system -
albeit I have met with companies marketing commercial systems less capable
than Drupal as precisely: CMS.
That is why I called CMS a Buzz Word before. I do not believe that content
management is a fad. In fact I believe that content management will give
work to a lot more IAs in the future, and that the rise of CMS is a sign of
recognition of the skills IAs bring to a company. And this recognition is
coming from the board room and the strategists - not really from the IT
department or marketing.

Ok - enough from me...

Over and out.

Gunnar Langemark
Skranten 9
3600 Frederikssund
Denmark
phone +45 47383904/mobile: +45 26277736
mail: gunnar at langemark.com
www: www.langemark.com