A funny thing happened to me on the way to becoming a published author... Shortly after Communicating Design hit the shelves, I became a father and I started my own business. The first was anticipated, the second was a bit of a surprise. Needless to say, these major personal changes had an enormous impact on my schedule, and I did not have the time to dedicate to building the companion site to the book that I wanted.

So, my sincerest apologies to the readers who have come here looking for templates and examples and other supporting materials. I was doing so many other things to support the book that the web site fell to the bottom of the list.

That said, this is one of the things I'd like to remedy in 2008, and I'm going to ask the user experience community at-large for their help. If you're interested in helping me to build a companion site to the book, please let me know!

Thanks for your continued patience and your ongoing enthusiasm for documentation!

Jeremy Flint offers a nice review of Communicating Design.

What Dan Brown has done is taken all of these tools that we hear about and put then into a single volume that could be considered THE source to consult when creating your project documentation, whether you need everything in the book, or just bits and pieces.

I continue to receive positive feedback on Communicating Design, and I'm grateful to everyone I've met at conferences and meet-ups who have such nice things to say.

This week, Erin Ammon posted the tenth review of Communicating Design to the Amazon page. One of the nice things she wrote:

While you may know some tricks of the trade, Dan guides you in great detail ways to finesse and refine what you already have built (or may be building). He calls attention to the important aspects these deliverables add such as strength to upcoming documentation and validation to previous documentation.

I know lots of you have been waiting for more content and depth on this web site. My intent is to create a resource for everyone working on user experience documentation, both a place to learn more and to share. If there is a road to hell, you can be sure this intention is one of the larger flagstones.

Therefore, I'm issuing a request to the community. If you can volunteer some time to help me set up a wiki on CommunicatingDesign.com, please drop me a line at brownorama (at) gmail (period) com.

Colleague and friend Christian Crumlish publishes a nice review in Extra! Extra!, his company's blog. The review is balanced, leveling a well-deserved critique at my last chapter. For those of your thinking about buying the book (which you should regardless), Christian's review provides a great overview. Excerpt:

I probably learned the most from his discussion of concept models, because I have the least amount of experience preparing these types of documents and I’ve always found them to be somewhat intimidating. He explains how to build them up from granular bits and also helps clarify a number of different approaches to connecting the nodes in such documents. He also includes as an illustration a version of Bryce Glass’s after-the-fact Flickr user model, an instant classic of the form.

Several readers have emailed, asking when I will turn CommunicatingDesign.com into a more comprehensive documentation resource. The answer: SOON! This is, in fact, one of my new year's resolutions, right between drinking less coffee and keeping my closet tidy.

Fortunately, CommunicatingDesign.com did not make Wired's annual vaporware review, but rest assured that I intend to have something up and running in the next couple of months, before the IA Summit in March.

Labels: reviews

From the review:

The most impressive aspect of the book though is the up-to-date discussion. Not content with describing what makes a good site map and how to present it we get the author’s well-thought out ideas on whether sitemaps are indeed up to the task in a world of user-generated content, search and non-hierarchical site structures (probably not apparently). In another chapter a disussion of the problems involved in carrying out a large content inventory are accompanied by details of why the perfect tool for the job is difficult to come by.

Read the whole review at ThinkVitamin.com.

Washington, DC colleague Rob Fay posted the first review of Communicating Design to Amazon.com. He coined the phrase "White Board Book," a reference to the image on the cover, a moniker I really like. More importantly, the review indicates that he got real value out of Communicating Design:

A few days after receiving the book, I was asked to create a content inventory of a particular web site. The practicality of the book helps me focus on what information I should be communicating to my intended audience and the examples spark ideas to make my work product better.

Thanks for the nice review, Rob, and I'm glad the White Board Book was a useful resource.

If you've read Communicating Design and have some stories to share, please post to Amazon.com. You can write a review, start a wiki, or post to the forum.

Digital Web magazine has published the second half of chapter five on competitive analyses. As with the latter part of all the other chapters in the book, this piece goes into detail about creating a competitive analysis document and explores how they can be shared with team members and stakeholders. Thanks to Cary, Mike, and Nick at Digital Web for publishing an excerpt from my book!