The Design of Sites: Ch. 5 — Processes for Developing Customer-Centered Sites
Chapter 5 of The Design of Sites. Synthesizes the patterns, principles, and techniques from Chapters 2–4 into a single end-to-end project process — Web Site Development Process — covering seven phases from initial discovery through ongoing maintenance.
License: © 2006 Pearson Education / New Riders — all rights reserved, no open license; one of the book’s co-authors is a FuguUX founder, which is the basis for citing it here.
Key points
- The chapter frames its seven-phase process as a deliberately non-linear, iterative structure: teams jump backward to earlier phases whenever evaluation reveals a problem, and doing so is framed as time/money saved, not a setback.
- The first four phases (Discovery, Exploration, Refinement, Production) are “the design process” — each moves from general to increasingly specific, each itself runs a tight design-prototype-evaluate loop, and each ends in a client checkpoint with concrete deliverables. The last three (Implementation, Launch, Maintenance) cover building, shipping, and sustaining the site.
- Discovery produces three documents — customer analysis, business analysis, and a specification — that anchor every later decision; the chapter calls not writing a specification document “the biggest risk you can take,” and warns against two common failure modes: skipping Discovery outright, and gold-plating (perfecting flashy-but-low-value features instead of shipping core ones in stages).
- Exploration and Refinement reuse the Rapid Prototyping artifacts from Chapter 4 (site maps, storyboards, schematics) at increasing fidelity, each tested with customers via evaluation before the client commits to one direction.
- Production, Implementation, Launch, and Maintenance get progressively more technical and operational — design/technical-spec documents, page templates, QA checklists, staged rollouts, and the ongoing decision of when a site needs a minor revision versus a complete redesign.