Reading 4

Process: Discovery

Politics, Diplomacy, and Consensus:
More information designers are having to know more about their clients: politics, goals, agendas, in order to create the most effective solution. It is important to get as much information about the company as possible even their client history. Knowing what happened before you got there can be useful.

It is very important for your couple initial meetings you are speaking directly with the person who has the ultimate decision making power. You do no want to work for days or weeks on something with a high chance of it not being approved.

1. Diagram the process before starting and explain how everyone is involved, this way everyone has something to refer to later.
2. Get a list of everyone who is on the team with all of their contact information. You cannot always assume the manager has everyone up to date info. This way if there is any kind of emergency you can work on getting it resolved sooner than later.
3. Assign people to the what they will be doing day to day.
4. Make a timeline. It is important to have urgency, but when it is false often times a project not be what was wanted.
5. Even though this seems like a lot of work and many things could be unforeseen to change the outcome, a little bit of planning helps their be less surprises once the designing has started.

Wrangling Audience and Content:
1. Know the audience: their wants, needs and goals, and how they align with the client's business strategy. Make sure you know all f the intended audiences, many of there needs conflict.
2. Understand the requirements: What does the audience need to know and why. How should your audience respond emotionally. And how will the information be viewed and by who, walking, sitting, once, many times, ect.

Organizing Content:
One effective way that was discussed was the Alphanumeric Solution. This is were you organize difficult, involved information using letters and numbers. Such as 'H' then its chapters 'H1' - 'H2' - 'H3' and each chapters subset: 'H1.1' - 'H1.2' - 'H1.3' This allows everyone to ask about a specific Alphanumeric rather than titles or chapters.

Markets are having to redefined a lot quicker than in the with less internal resources and workforce. Many times the client will have hard to understand information/content and you will discover challenges with what the tone or message is. The thing to remember: if you have a difficult time understanding the information more than likely so will any audience.These days many designers are most effective when they can do an initial design for someone and then allow them to update it when needed.