Sitemaps, Storyboards, and Specifications: A Sketch of Web Site Design

Abstract

We conducted an ethnographic investigation into site design practice in the interest of gaining insight to direct the development of informal tools to support designers. During the phase of the project described here, we conducted an informal study involving interviews with professional designers and examination of works-in-progress to improve our understanding of the design practice in professional settings. In this report we present the results of our initial investigation, including observations about common and divergent design practices among the organizations studied, the types of intermediate design artifacts observed, the importance of such artifacts, and the existence of multiple design sub-specialties which confuse the definition of web design.