Questionathons

Quickly Injecting the Right Ideas Into Your Guidelines

When writing guidelines, you should be describing solutions, not forming them. Therefore, you have to ask all the right questions.

As a design matures and stabilizes near the end of a project, design teams shift their attention to writing guidelines, transforming the design into something others can re-use on future projects. EightShapes’ approach to writing guidelines starts with pairing two people together for a rapid session of Q&A. We call this the Questionathon.

The Participants

Ideally, one of two setups works best:

• If the designer ISN’T the author, pair him or her with the guideline author who serves as the interviewer.
• If the designer IS the author, pair that person with someone else that understands how things get used and can ask lots of questions. Usually, this is the librarian (preferred) or a writer, content strategist, or producer.

The Preparation

• Gather artifacts: Get pictures of the design and, if authored, any annotations and specs that are available.
• Understand your content model: Prepare examples of similar guidelines and have an idea how you will organize them. For example, we often employ design pattern properties like Use When (and Use Where and Don’t Use When), Problem, Solution (the detailed guidelines), and Rationale.
• Prepare to take notes: Have paper & pen ready, or even better, an open text file that someone can rapidly type the questions and, if well known, the answers.

The Race

The session doesn’t have to be formal or timed, and plays out as race that combines interviewing meets freelisting with a dash of “what if” roleplaying. To whet your appetite, here are real questions I’ve asked during a recent questionathon:

• What problem does this solve?
• When do I use each variation? When shouldn’t I use a variation?
• Can I make this more personalized for my area of the site? Or do I have to use that corporate one? [Another group] got to do one, so why can’t I?
• Where’s the code, and how do I customize it?
• Can I use this in other page layouts? (if so, which ones?)
• Can I use use this in other regions of the page, or can I only use it in this location?
• Can I use this more than once on a page?
• Can I choose whether to have this or just a simple dropdown of options, like they do for other market segments and countries?
• Can I change any copy or images? What is locked down? What is system driven?
• For copy I can change, how long can it be? How many repeated instances can I use (such as a bullet count)? Can it wrap?
• Are these examples suitable for guidelines? Are there other examples available or that we could create easily?
• Is this a fixed size or does it size relative to the content it contains?
• Based on how these multiple elements vary together, what else can I add, remove, or recombine?
• What elements are required, recommended or optional?
• Are the styles locked down, or can I choose things like font family, weight, size and color?
• Can I repurpose this interactive module with different copy, iconography, and calls-to-action? (Article list? Sure. Site Header? No way.)
• Why is this important? Why is it designed the way it is? This more open-ended question gets at the heart of the design’s intent, something you’ll want to come through in your explanation.

The Trick: Avoid Solving Problems

When writing guidelines, you should be describing solutions, not forming them. In fact, the guidelines author may not even be empowered to solve anything — that’s the role of the collaborative design process. Therefore, this session should focus on identifying all the questions, not necessarily all the answers.

If the answer is obvious and easy to describe, then do it. If an answer is unclear or the problem hasn’t yet been considered, then capture only the question and move on. The author can challenge the design team to get the answer later.

The Finish

If you are running out of steam, try these tips:

• Audibly say things like “Can I…”, “How do I…”, and “Am I allowed to…”, look at the design, and listen for what you say next.
• Brainstorm examples to include in the guidelines, especially pictures of relevant screens.
• Canvas your design for all those quantitative constraints: character counts, list item counts (even per page), thumbnail counts, height and width, and more.

The questionathon could go on for a long time–but don’t. There are diminishing returns the longer the session, and we usually stall and break after 20 to 30 minutes on each topic, such as a component, page type or other item.

Creating guidelines doesn’t have to be an arduous task. It does require, however, a substantive commitment. After a Questionathon, authors will find writing progresses much smoother and should be equipped to translate the questions they know — and the answers they’ll find — into great standards documentation.

Originally published at www.eightshapes.com on October 29, 2010.