Successful user experience design depends on communicating ideas through compelling and thorough design artifacts. Ask any of our peers, and they'll tell you that Dan Brown and Nathan Curtis are the go-to guys for creating, promoting, and teaching effective documentation methods.

• Site maps & flow charts
• Wireframes
• Screen designs
• Pattern libraries
• Functional specifications
• Usability test plans & reports
• Competitive analysis
• Concept models
• Content inventories

Over the last ten years, EightShapes principals have presented on deliverables at industry conferences and workshops, and written articles for Boxes and Arrows. They recently added Communicating Design to their arsenal of expertise, a unique book about creating and using documentation.

Custom Documentation Systems

In the last year, EightShapes created custom documentation systems for UX teams at Sun Microsystems, National Geographic, Revolution Health, Comcast Communications, and Discovery Communications. Such systems incorporate mapping & annotation standards, artifact modularization, and tricks of the trade learned over years of experience. System adoption is streamlined by a thorough assessment of team needs and capabilities, targeted getting started guides, facilitated training, and video instruction.

By incorporating a systematic approach to design documentation, organizations have increased production efficiency, consistency, scale, and cross-designer portability as resourcing needs shift.

What to do?

So is your organization feeling the pain of inconsistent approaches to documentation? Do your product management, IT development, and testing organization complain that artifacts are simply too crude, inconsistent, or lack depth? Could you benefit from a standardized template system or custom training on creating UX design deliverables? Then it's time to contact EightShapes for help.