[Sigia-l] depicting lifecycle in site maps?

[Andrew Boyd]

On 7/20/07, Eric Scheid <eric.scheid at ironclad.net.au> wrote:
> I've recently worked on a websites which was complicated by the fact that
> there was a planned lifecycle involved: ie. the site at launch time was one
> structure (for a given purpose/audience), time would pass, and the structure
> of the site would need to change as the purpose for the site changed. The
> amount of change wasn't that great, but I know of other sites where the
> planned change over time would be much more drastic.
>
> Thankfully, the site was relatively small and simple, and so planning out
> the structure in a site map wasn't too complicated. I simply drew up the
> whole site, with all pages from all stages of the lifecycle, and annotated
> the nodes as to when they appeared/disappeared. I also split them into
> different layers, so I could print out the site map as it would appear at
> the various life cycle stages.
>
> It got me thinking though ... how do others handle this problem?

Hi Eric,

ideally, a set of overlays showing the changes - be these in
structure/navigation, layout, interaction, whatever. Ideally, whatever
is needed to adequately support the overlays - personas, interaction
diagrams, presentations, and so on. There needs to be metastuff to
adequately communicate the changes in stuff - and there are no end of
fancy three dollar words floating around for the metastuff, I'll leave
these to the "thought leaders" :)

I've seen this handled badly where:
- there is no consistent way of communicating design from IA to
developer, and/or
- there are no tools in common between BAs, IAs and developers, or if
they are in common, don't support overlays, and/or
- the overall communication process doesn't scale with the growing
system complexity. I say complexity because most staged processes
offer more rather than less functionality, and with more functionality
more complexity. Complexity is not your friend, but it doesn't have to
be your enemy either if you plan for it.

Cheers, Andrew
-- 
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Andrew Boyd
http://facibusreviews.com