Main conference presentation
The Living Design Document and ION: Documenting RIAs
Saturday March 24 2007, 11:30 - 12:15PM
The complexity of documenting web sites/applications has grown in the last few years due to the general acceptance of using methods such as AJAX in the creation of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Since the proliferation of RIAs there has been a paradigm shift away from the page metaphor: inter-page interactions have become intra-page interactions.
Designing and documenting these interactions is difficult because we are now dealing with objects that interact with each other within a single page. Diagramming methods we have relied on, such as the Visual Vocabulary, tend to break in this new metaphor. Communicating the design to developers has increasingly become verbose and complex. With the added complexity of RIAs and the iterative nature of web application development, the final operative image of the application and the documentation quickly diverge.
This presentation will cover our attempt to address these issues and to create an Interface Object Notation (ION) for RIAs and devise the Living Design Document. ION is a pseudo code language intended to consistently describe the functionality of page objects within a RIA to programmers and clients alike. Simply put, ION is a new standard way to notate wireframes and page objects. The Living Design Document (LDD) is a documentation system that attempts to capture the operative image of an RIA throughout it’s entire life cycle.
Current standard practices such as wireframes, sitemaps, interaction flow diagrams (detailed with the Visual Vocabulary), and click-through prototypes are all leveraged in the LDD method. Our goal is to combine these tools and techniques to create continuous documentation in an agile fashion that is detailed at the intra-page interaction level or at the page object level.
We wish to share our experience in developing ION and LDD to others within our industry to help spur conversation and development of a design documentation standard for RIAs. Our work is applicable to desktop application development, widgets, and websites as well.
Examples will be provided.
