lanehalley

Q: In Alan's talks, he sometimes mentions a "design blueprint" What does this mean?

A: A design blueprint is a form and behavior specification that illustrates what every screen looks like and describes the states and behaviors of every control. It also contains the personas, scenarios and a summary of the research used to generate them.

As you might expect, the information is presented in several ways to meet the needs of different audiences: A high-level framework which describes the parts of the interface and their relationships, pictures of individual areas and controls which describe all the parts and their functions in different states and a series of full-screen pictures which illustrate key scenarios. The blueprint also contains a visual style guide that defines the color, typography and visual look of the interface.

Depending on the complexity of the project, the document can be quite large. Because we are consultants, we often transition the document to our clients when construction starts. They then place the information under source control with other project documents. If you're doing this in-house, you could just as easily start the document under source control.

As construction starts, the design team works with the construction team to resolve problems and change the design. The objective is to keep the blueprint up to date with the current design of the product. I've seen clients do this using comments on .pdf versions of the blueprint, or they make document changes in the document source with some sort of version control. As you can guess, this takes time to do, but pays off in clarity, especially when you're working with a distributed team (in the US and India, for example)