7.5. Running Interaction Design Projects

UCD will help you develop a model of the requirements of the different people coming to your site. The process develops a lot of internal documentation from personas and the various task-based approaches. You can run UCD projects in different ways; some of them take a “design upfront” approach, and others are more iterative in their style. The more iterative approach fits better with agile methods, but it depends on the scale of the project. Agile is a software development practice that emphasizes working code rather than copious documentation. The focus is on iterating in short cycles with working models—“design upfront” is better than “code upfront” in most cases. Building a suite of code without an idea of the final user interface (or needs) is a recipe for disaster with a social web application.

A larger UCD project can take on a life of its own, almost becoming a full project prior to your building the actual application. UCD projects frequently deliver fully fledged wireframes, which can seem like mockups for the actual application. There is much discussion on UCD mailing lists regarding whether showing this output to clients is a good idea because the output can look like unfinished site designs, even though it is valuable work. If you are an agency building sites for other companies, you will have an in-house approach to this problem. If you are an internal team, these documents can be important tools to get better engagement with other people in the company. Later in this chapter, we’ll look at other document types like interactive mockups.