Combining personas, sitemaps and user flows.

"What if my personas could talk… then they would tell me what they think about my sitemap. Sitemap + what the user thinks sparkled the bulb and I was finding myself putting speech bubbles next to my sitemap. The bubble wasn’t a new concept as I have used the idea with my commented sitemap. Then I added a small profile photo of my persona next to the speech bubble, time stamp above the bubble, arrows for the journey, a scenario and a summary of what the persona wants to do on the website. This did the job and I think the results were outstanding."

See the step by step guide on barnabasnagy.net

"As I coach new developers, I've taken to scribbling out the same useful diagram for visualizing the creative process again and again on coffee-ringed napkins. In order to limit my future abuse of culinary paper wares, I've reproduced my images in a more formal fashion in this essay."

http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/08/visualizing-creative-process.html

Examples

Here are a few examples of using Touch Notation to encode various gestures. When I’m creating formal documents using Touch Notation, I tend to use black for the number of fingers and blue for the entire gestural part, just to give a subtle sense of energy and motion to the gesture. You’ll find that the gesture instructions in tutorials in the iPad versions of the iWork apps do the same thing.

• Tap (with 1 finger)

• Double-tap with 3 fingers

• Swipe right with 2 fingers

"Within the last twelve to eighteen months, I’ve crossed a threshold whereby the vast majority of my work is now aimed at touch-screen devices. I often have to sketch out feature specs, interaction designs and so forth, and I enjoy working on paper whenever I can. I quickly encountered a problem: touch-screen gestures are difficult to describe concisely. To solve this problem, I created a means of talking about such gestures symbolically; I call it Touch Notation."

http://mattgemmell.com/2010/07/14/touch-notation#

"Years ago I dropped a simple illustration into a proposal to convey the design process to a client. It was meant to illustrate the characteristics of the process we were to embark on, making it clear to them that it might be uncertain in the beginning, but in the end we’d focus on a single point of clarity. It seemed to work. And from then on, I’ve used it since. Many many times."

http://centralstory.com/about/squiggle/