For projects like websites, often these individual entity and collection of entities become separate pages. Keep in mind that you might have individual entities as well as collections of these same entity types that will need to be searched, traversed, or browsed in some way. This can be collected in a text editor or directly into the image editing application.ĭon’t focus on the details of what is inside each of these entities, or how they will be presented in the system, just how they are connected to one another. You can think of them as the “entities” that the project must incorporate in order to be a success. “Things” are usually nouns mentioned in multiple locations. Go through these documents and pull out the “things” the project will be made up of. One way to do it:Ĭollect your user interviews and other research into the purpose and scope of the project. Small ( 1- 2 hours) for an initial site map. This should be presented as a proposal to stakeholders over a video conference, and collaboratively iterated on as the project becomes more well defined. Who’s involved:ĭesigners, developers, and stakeholders. Journey maps provide a deep dive on a specific flow, while site maps provide a satellite view of where that journey took place in the context of the entire system. It can be used as an alternative to, or in conjunction with, Journey Maps. Site maps are created after you’ve investigated the purpose of your project, with tools like User Interviews, and you are ready to start mocking things up. Keep it simple, and whittle down the flow till you have something you can easily communicate and converse about. Most likely, there will be alternative paths users will take, but in the site map we want to show the flows the design will work toward encouraging. We focus on showing “central” or “primary” flows in the map. The site map also captures the flow of how your users will move through the project’s content.
If a portion of the deliverable is identified as necessary, but out of the scope of the current project, it can be marked as such explicitly on the site map. The site map can serve as a visual representation of the deliverables of the project. With defining the project, the scope of the project is also defined. At a basic level, they are great for simply communicating what we mean when we say “the project”, and help identify and address inconsistencies in this definition amongst stakeholders. We use a site map to define the scope of a project and show how its various pieces connect.