Dan Brown on Spoolcast
Posted by Kristi Olson on December 14, 2008
Yesterday while hiking at the dog park, I listened to Dan Brown’s interview with Jared Spool on the Spoolcast (http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2008/12/09/spoolcast-documenting-design-with-dan-brown/). I attended Dan’s documentation seminar last December at the Usability Week 2007 conference, and enjoyed the seminar thoroughly. He really does fill a gap, presenting approaches, purposes and best practices for IA documentation. And, Dan sincerely seems to want to help us up-and-comers by sharing his solid industry knowledge.
Some points of interest in his conversation were about documentation “objectives”, and Concept Models. With regard to the former, he says that each document you decide to create needs to have a role, like a person on your team. It has a solid purpose, and as people’s roles can change throughout a project lifecycle, so can a document’s.
The latter, Concept Models, seems to be capturing interest with my big-picture (strategic-thinking, wide-eyed) IA friends. I’ve heard others reference “mind mapping”, which I think is the same thing (just broader). I like Dan’s examples of how he’s used them — typically for his own purpose (not usually as a client deliverable) to understand the client domain or relationship between client entities. One new thing I learned from the podcast is that is can be good for mapping content types — sweet! I can totally grasp the value of creating one to have as a reference while wireframing.
