[Sigia-l] depicting lifecycle in site maps?

[Jay Morgan]

Eric,

I am working on two projects now where I'm incorporating a
timeline/lifecycle in the IA deliverables.

First Project:  An online circular project (retail ecommerce) for a holiday
week where we will cycle through 3 unique Flash experiences over 7 days.
Each of the three experiences means a different layout for the landing page
and one of them uses assets from a different host.  Because we're working
across 3 internal teams, an outside agency, an external development team and
two hosting partners, I first used storyboards (in Visio) to give a big
picture display of how the landing page would change as we cycle through the
experiences.  I tagged/noted the storyboards with timing, hosting info, and
other details.  Additionally, I created a more specific timeline for project
deliverables - including banners, promotional emails, and Flash files - so
we could all see (and agree on) what we were responsible for at what time.
Putting these two together made explicit the dependencies between each
team.  It changed our meetings from confused conference calls to more
coordinated and collaborative design meetings.

Second Project:  I'm teaching our interactive teams (creative, business,
operations, dev, and external agencies) how to use personas throughout our
lifecycle.  We have two basic ways to use personas: to generate or to
evaluate/test designs.  (Fortunately our project lifecycle has a color-coded
bar that's branded on it's documentation so everyone can tell the stages
apart.)  The personas relate to different methods and deliverables at each
step of the lifecycle.  I have one page in the educational deck that
explains how the personas are used at that point in time.  I'm using that
lifecycle color bar on the bottom of each page in a Google Finance or MIT
Simile fashion.

Hope this helps.  I love timelines as a foundational reference in the IA
because they give everyone a concrete frame for planning what is typically
very abstract work.

- Jay

On 7/20/07, Eric Scheid < eric.scheid at ironclad.net.au> wrote:
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> It got me thinking though ... how do others handle this problem?
>
> e.
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-- 
Jay Morgan
Applied cognitive scientist practicing information architecture, interaction
design, and corporate culture manipulation