At CanUX 2008 in Banff, Yvonne Shek described UX swimlane deliverables that help clients understand users, business needs and technology all at once.
- UX swimlanes outline a bird’s eye view of a story, scenario, or component for sponsors, designers, businesses, and engineers.
- Executive & sponsors: high level comic that illustrates the scenario
- UX & creative team: flow through steps of a process
- Business: fulfillment process and business logic
- Technical team & architects: data systems, back-end technology
- When to use swim lanes: really early in the project during discovery & strategy stage to get everyone on the same page
- Helps to get buy-in on the scope of a key scenario or story from stakeholders
- Focuses on what you are building and why are you building it. Outlines requirements for stakeholders and working team
- How do we start making swim lanes: start with workshops to set scope (what’s in and what’s out)
- Flows first: who is user what are their goals, etc.
- Comics second, business and technical third and at the same time. Work with business analyst & technical team to fill them out.
- Product manager swim lanes come last: uses cases & features/functions
- Comics are cool but hard to do. Could use photos, sketches, etc instead.
- Delivering comics with whole diagram helps bring executives on board. Comics alone may not support the stakeholders
- Overview of swimlanes
- Swimlanes example
- More information & templates
