Any successful business project begins with a thorough examination and knowledge of the business processes, rules, industry, and intended audience and for an external designer, the company’s decision makers. This initial research can take quite a bit of time. Although there is always data available about a particular business or industry, getting to know the human capital that is involved in the design process is far more difficult and time consuming. To help ease this process along at reasonable rate, creating a diagram of the process gives everyone a feel for the big picture. Listing all of those involved and what their role is in the design process will facilitate communication throughout the project’s existence. A soft timeline of what is expected is an excellent reference tool for the life of the project. 

To get the project off the ground the design team should begin with the Creative Brief, a document from one to two pages long that is essentially a road map of the project. This document gives a clear understanding to the design team of the projects background and goals. The brief is basically documenting all that was learned in the research phase of the project. 

Anyone who is planning on teaching, informing or entertaining a group is far more successful when they know their audience. In information design, knowing the intended audience’s emotional and physical requirements for communicating your information will help the designer create a positive and winning experience for the user. Creating personas, or user profiles, which are representative members of your audience, helps the design team align the project with their needs and expectations. Creating a profile with depth and details helps the designer view the member as a full person and helps then to imagine more fully how a person will interact with their design. 

The next phase in the design process is creating a site map. This is a type of flow chart that is a visual outline of all of the components of a design project. This map helps the design team come to a general consensus of the project’s plan before beginning development. It is easy to add and delete from the site map as the project develops, allowing for easy revisions and changes. From the skeleton of the site map, the designers then move to the wireframes. These schematics give shape to the project while helping decide the which elements are least and most important and what areas are focal points and need to be showcased. The wireframes allow for more planning without worrying about color and shape. When the wireframes are finished the design team will be able to see the look and feel of the final project.

The final phase of the design process is to allow for testing. Allowing the users to test the project will reveal any problems with the design that need to modify prior to the project can be called complete. There are several different testing types. Different types can be used during the entire length of the design process. Concept tests usually occur early in the design phase because they are requesting feedback on a particular idea, in design testing you are requesting feedback on particular visual designs and how they might look, focus groups request feedback from a group of the same demographic reviewing a finished project, usability testing tests whether everything in the design is truly working, and beta and performance testing is looking for bugs in a code and checking software.

After all of the reading on the processes of information design I felt that the research was the most important part.  This is the crucial step that I believe is often missing and even though it is time consuming, it has the ability to make or break the project’s goals. I felt the process was very thorough and I couldn’t think of any areas where I could suggest improvement. 

I would like to apply this assignments information to my blog post by creating a site map.  We have been taught about the ability for a site map to help in development, but it is also helpful to upload your blog’s site map to your web server to allow search engine crawlers find out what pages are present or have changed. (Build your Site Map online)Now I realize this is a class and I don’t intend to keep this particular blog going, but it could be very beneficial in the future to know how to upload your sitemap. I am hoping the class gets involved and tests my site throughout this course, so I can modify it as needed.