This has been on my mind a lot lately. I feel like our process is very fast and accomplishes the right things, but I don't have much to compare it to. It'd really mean a lot to me to know your company's design process and to gather any feedback you have on the process I outline below. I'm looking for ways to improve what we do.
So here's how we do design at onegreatfamily.com: We are a small company, we have 8 developers. We consider ourselves an "Agile/Scrum" shop. We have 2 designers, one assigned to the windows app and one assigned to the website. The designer has 10 business days to do the following: 1. Gather requirements from the CEO and VP of marketing. Typically those two have provided the designer a one sentence "task" they want to accomplish. So the designer queries them for the initial details. 2. Based on the size of the requirements gathered, decide how much they are going to be able to do in the 10 days they have to design. 3. Talk to lead developers if there are any uncertain technical issues that the designer anticipates. 4. Quickly draw up wireframes of the primary flows in whatever fidelity is important based on the requirements. 5. Present the initial wireframes to the CEO and VP to discuss and gather feedback. 6. Make changes to the wireframes based on the feedback. 7. Conduct user labs on what is drawn up so far either with internal non-project people (like customer support) or by bringing in our target customers. Sessions are usually 45 minutes and done with paper prototypes. 2-3 people are brought in. 8. Makes changes and/or discusses issues with CEO and VP. 9. Add all visual design details if not already present. 10. Write 50-80% of what we call our "user stories" which is our streamlined design document. 11. Query and discuss with lead developers on any technical concerns. 12. Do a follow up user lab if needed. 13. Present progress to CEO and VP, gather feedback. 14. Make changes based on the feedback. 15. Present one last time to the CEO and VP for an official "final sign off". Typically by this stage the CEO and VP have reached a consensus about the design and have very little left to change or discuss. 16. Show the final state of the design and the design doc to the developers for their design input and a last "can it be done" approval/review. 17. Discuss feedback with CEO and VP if necessary. 18. Make changes based on the developer's feedback. 19. Officially hand off the finished document including supporting screenshots and the Illustrator files that contain all the finished graphic design to the developers and QA. 20. The developers then code the html and the functionality according to spec. 21. QA then uses the design doc to test against what development gives them. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
