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Sunday, 6th April 2008, No Comments »

Page flow in a UCDevelopment approach

A couple of times in the last few months, for various reasons, I’ve ended up with the task of having to explain to clients how the page designs that where developed flow together. Personally, I’ve never found it easy to explain the concepts of page flow without a diagram to ‘non-technical’ people, however, I’ve found that even with a diagram, normally you need to re-explain the page flow a couple of times until they get it or pretend they do until the project is completed.

While thinking about the User centered development approach, I really felt a key concept should be the interface is the functional specification. The issue what that is you could end up focusing on single templates in a vacuum, at best visual inconsistency between the individual designs creep in, at worse, the GUI becomes a frankenstein like creature with no overall hierarchy, missing templates and no visual consistency.

Sitemaps are rubbish

With a sitemap you are usually only showing one thing, hierarchy of overall pages or sections (sometimes with a reference to which template will be applied). I’ve found this next to useless with those ‘non-technical’ people, mainly because the need to mentally juggle from the concept of the hierarchy to which/how each template is applied in that hierarchy is just to much.

I’d like to suggest the next sitemap or a flow diagram you have to do, you do something like this,

I believe, by even just applying the interface into the sitemap those ‘non-technical’ people will be better informed about making a call. You and your developers will find it easier to pick on hierarchal mistakes, missing templates and visual inconsistencies.