Chapter 1. Introduction

Design is a complex process composed of many smaller activities: listening, analyzing, evaluating, brainstorming, synthesizing, experimenting, composing, describing, discussing, exploring, reacting, and countless others. Documenting is not one of these activities, but engaging in any of these activities yields artifacts—diagrams, notes, sketches, lists, inventories, annotations, and larger documents—that result from the act of performing the task. At the same time, each task requires inputs, and these artifacts that come from doing design are the same things that can help feed the design process. The success of the task directly relates to the quality of the inputs, and may be measured on the quality of its outputs.

As a web designer, I don’t set out to create wireframes or flowcharts (two artifacts typical in the design process). My aim is to design a web site. These diagrams are merely useful tools in that endeavor, and I’d quickly discard them if more useful tools came along. This is an important point: Wireframes (or any other design diagram) may be the output of a design task, but they are not the product or the objective.