Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning (Voices That Matter)

This book addresses a really key issue many designers fail to accommodate in their practices. Being able to transfer design ideas between disciplines isn't easy so it really helps to agree on the techniques and tools before starting work. Use the book as a starting point with your agency. Share the learnings from the book. Make sure your design teams understand the broad range of people they will need to communicate with. I recommend this book all the time.

I'm 20 pages in and already hooked. Fantastic book and really recommend it thus far. Within this, Dan talks about the one thing they don't really teach you at design school and that's how to best communicate your design - both internally and externally to clients. It's a difficult concept - understanding different personality traits to best alter your approach whilst getting the best out of both people and the design. I was recently lucky enough to talk to Dan about his position on conflict within design based on the premises within this book : - http://davidmannheim.co.uk/blog/interview-dan-brown/ - of which he talks about how to best manage these situations using real life experiences. It was my research leading up to this interview that led me to buying the book and currently finding it difficult to put down.

When I got this book I feel very substantial. I am not read it yet, but I bought this book because one of my teacher recommended it to me. So I think this book might be a perfect one.

Lots to take in. I liked that they stressed that this is more a process for discovering/understanding your content than a goal of creating charts and graphs and Excel files... the goal isnt to make all this documentation, it's to do what works for you in order to HELP you make better decisions, so you can pick and choose which strategies work for you. That's a really valuable lesson to learn. Haven't even finished the book yet but really enjoying it.

Communicating Design Second Edition by Dan M. Brown is a delightful read--one especially suited for those taking Web programming courses or wanting to learn the inside strategies on Web site design/programming preparation. The book starts off by covering the fundamentals of wireframes, personas, site maps, concept models, and flowcharts. These components of the book are not only technical in a how-to format, but also practical in a business sense. In fact, Dan Brown makes a point of stressing how to negotiate these "deliverables" in business meetings, in essence preparing the reader for a career in design strategies. The second part of the book not only emphasizes how to format the products (i.e., wireframes, personas, etc) into professional deliverables through providing structure for the reports, but also delves into competitive reviews, usability plans, and usability reports. Of most interest to me was the competitive review, as it helped establish the framework (including site map) of a site I'm about to build. One easily overlooked shortcoming of the book is that it doesn't spend the time on research strategies, such as focus groups and interviews that the book A Project Guide To UX Design by Russ Unger does. However, Communicating Design exceeds many other books in its elaboration on the personas, wireframes, site maps, flow carts, etc.--the actual deliverables. Although the book doesn't delve into how to create the deliverables in different software programs (it only mentions a few of the usable programs like Illustrator and Microsoft Visio, for instance), one can go to Lynda.com for a month-to-month membership and access tutorials on these components. Communicating Design shows, instead, how to create the different deliverables, how to conduct oneself in business presentations of the deliverables, and how to format them into impressive reports. It is also important to note that Dan Brown's second edition felt more cumbersome at first, due to its wide size, but after spending time with the interior of the book, the read was quite pleasant. The pages were glossed with lots of white space and friendly diagrams. Dan Brown's book proved essential in helping me prepare for the initial design set-up of a Website, and I would argue that the steps he provides in his book are almost indispensable to making an excellent site. A good companion to this book for web developers, particularly, might be Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets, which requires some background knowledge in Javascript and provides Search Engine (i.e., Google) Optimization strategies--a fundamental consideration when starting a site.

This book was a great resource in giving best practices of how to display complicated UX ideas and design. The cherry on top was that each design section also comes with suggestions on how to run a client through a meeting using the tools referenced.

OK, I'm biased, but I love this book. Dan did such a great job creating a book that you actually WANT to come back to time and again. If you're like me, you probably have lots of books on your shelf, and they look nice up there, but you may not take them down and actually use them very much. This book might not look as nice on your shelf, because you'll use it so much that it will get beat up. Which is a good thing.