"Egan says that it took a year to "control and calibrate" the story she's now tweeting; her tight prose doesn't exactly invite replies. But the shift into Twitter is a truly modern serialization technique; there's more going on here than simply contemporary fiction meted out 140 characters at a time."

"Though the economics of the business have drastically changed since our purchase of The Buffalo News, I believe newspapers that intensively cover their communities will have a good future. It’s your job to make your paper indispensable to anyone who cares about what is going on in your city or town."

“The magic of cities is that they’re freewheeling and chaotic,” concluded Lehrer. “It’s a bunch of strangers bumping into each other. Cities don’t try to maximize creativity which is precisely why they do. Companies on the other hand micromanage, we chain ourselves to desk, we don’t drink beer in the afternoon, we brainstorm when we don’t want to brainstorm.”

"As to how he finds design solutions, he says the process is almost the opposite of having a "Eureka" moment. "It is more like solving a crime. The answer is there, and your job is to find it. So we go off and do bits of research that essentially eliminate suspects from the enquiry. And then you follow up leads and gradually narrow down the potential solutions. Ultimately what you're left with is the answer. Even if you'd thought of it at the beginning of the process, you could never know it was right until the end."

"I cant tell you why other people write, but I
write in order to keep from going insane.
my head, I expect'd turn inside out if my hands
were t leave me."

What's an experience map? "it's a model. A model on steroids. It's an artifact that serves to illuminate the complete experience a person may have with a product or service.

But it's not just about the illustration of the journey (that would simply be a journey map). And it's not a service blueprint which shows how a system works in enough detail to verify, implement and maintain it."

What are the criteria for a good experience map? "First, it can stand on its own, meaning it can be circulated across an organization and doesn't need to be explained, framed or qualified. Like others, we make our experience maps large, often greater than five feet long. They're meant to engender a shared reference of the experience, consensus of the good and the bad. Second, it's clearly a means to something actionable—ideally something to design around—and not an end in and of itself. A good experience map feels like a catalyst, not a conclusion."

About experience maps: "It should also illuminate the most important dimensions—which could be the transition from phase to phase, or the switching between different channels. This is where you may want to get your Tufte on and make sure that you aren't simply illustrating the journey step-by-step, but ideally revealing something about it based on how you model the data, e.g. how many people use one channel over the other, which part of the experience is blatantly broken, or which part of the experience hasn't been considered much?"
Author: Chris Risdon, Adaptive Path, Nov 30, 2011

Requirements

Before working on comps, you want to understand your client’s requirements and the scope. At the beginning of the project, gather information, complete background research, analyze the budget, outline the timeline, review maintenance needs, establish the purpose of the website, and document who is the target audience (you know that it is not the client who’ll put up with the website!).

In most cases, this is part of the project profiler. This is a bare-bones example, and you can modify it as you gain more experience. Identify the client single point-of-contact to avoid nagging from all directions. It’s valuable to clarify and document roles and responsibilities of the players on the project.

As the project progresses, a typical client or co-worker will attempt to add more stuff especially when discovering all those cool, wiggly thingies on the web. Consider explaining to the client that any change during the project requires a change request document. The document spells out the new requirement, modified timelines and approved budget for the changes. Too often, designers find themselves agreeing “to add this little item since we’re working on it anyway.” Those nasty little items add up to continuous sleepless nights.

Beneficial items to include in requirements:

Message
Audience
Action
Content
Technology capabilities
Maintenance / support
Administration
Site promotion / search engines
Schedule
Naming conventions
Communications checkpoints

When all sign-offs and approvals are done, move forward to Design.

story of design process. narrative