[Sigia-l] Managing product design documentation

[Reinoud Bosman]

Hey Aida,

First of all organise your documents. Put all the wireframes of one project
into one visio file using tabs. Put them in a project folder structure.

Make sure only team members that are on the project have access to the
files. Make sure that all team members on the project have access to the
files and know where to look for them.

I (mis)used source control software for this before (Rational - exxxpensive,
CVS - open source) and it works really well, especially because it
automatically takes care of versioning so you don't end up with 30 wireframe
files in one directory. You know.. wireframes_v1.1, wireframes_v1.2 etc etc.
It will also make sure that only one person at a time is allowed to work on
a file so you don't overwrite each other's work.
The downside is that it'll use up quite a lot of space because unlike code
source control it doesn't just save the changes.

Document maintenance unfortunately is the name of our game. I keep a front
sheet with a version history where I put all the changes made as specific as
possible. And still team members will miss a change sometimes.

For follow-up projects I have used colours to mark changes (all my
wireframes are strictly black and white) which works really well to
communicate change to clients at sign-off rounds. At the end of the project
I baseline everything back to black&white. This works well, but it's still
hard to communicate changes between version 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 to the team.

-Especially when you forgot to put that comma right there.. (uhhrg.. back to
the version history to exactly describe where that new comma went ;)

regards,
r.


On 6/15/05 3:52 PM, "Kenyon, Aida N (AT - Atlanta)"
<Aida.Kenyon at autotrader.com> wrote:

> I was wondering if any of you had thoughts on how to manage a large
> amount of product design documentation -- specifically a couple of
> hundred paper-based (Visio) wireframes.  We are talking about one large
> set of documentation being used by multiple designers (IAs) with
> multiple concurrent projects and multiple development teams.  The two
> big goals are to have up-to-date documentation at all times and to keep
> document maintenance to an absolute low.
> 
> So what are talking about?  Content Management Systems? Fancy processes?
> Ditch the paper-based/Visio documentation? Source Code Management
> systems but for design docs?  I'm open to any and all ideas.
> 
> With thanks.
> -Aida
> 
> Aida Najarian Kenyon
> Interaction Design/Information Architect
> Autotrader.com
> aida.kenyon at autotrader.com
> AIM: aidankenyon
> (404) 269-6844
> 
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