"One of our core strengths is that we're user-centric," said Drue Miller, senior information designer at vivid studios. "We're not known as a flashy design studio. People don't come to us because they want a site that's bleeding edge, one that looks and performs in that advanced, we've-got-the-latest-technology way. We're interested in taking context, sets of information, and complicated procedures and simplifying them. We try to make them meaningful and usable."

Not every client has a common understanding of information design and where it fits into the site design process.

"The terminology isn't standardized," Miller said. "So what information designers do at one firm is very different from what they do at another firm. Some people think, 'Oh, information design. That means you do flowcharts.' They don't see anything beyond that. Other places see information design as the responsibility of the visual designer, or they see storyboards as an expression of visual design and not as the path through the site."

Information Design: Where Does It Fit In?
Even before vivid wins a project, the team is thinking about information design.

"Before we respond to an RFP [request for proposal], we put together an ad-hoc team of people that represents all the different disciplines at our company. We review the RFP and decide if it's something we want to bid on," Miller explained. "That ad-hoc group drafts the proposal. As an information designer, I end up writing a lot of creative briefs - typically, I'll write a site critique if we're bidding on redesigning a site. I'll review the site and talk about what its key strengths are, what I perceive the site to be about and how it breaks down, and include those observations in the proposal. So even before we get the project, we're thinking about the structure."

The majority of the information design work happens in the conceptual stages of the project. At vivid, the first of five development phases is the concept and planning stage. It focuses on the client's needs and, as a result, the site's structure.

"Right from the start, we're thinking about the nature of the content and how it's going to be presented, whether it's verbal, or visual, or presented by more dynamic means - or how much interactivity is needed to support it," Miller said. "We do a lot of brainstorming about the audience and its requirements, their expectations and needs, and the messages that the publisher has in mind, that is, the key experience and information we want to get across from the client," Miller explained.

In that first phase, the information designer creates a preliminary flow chart for the site. The chart goes through numerous revisions and review cycles with the client, which helps vivid and the client stay on the same page, so to speak, throughout the site development process.

Getting Into the User's Head
Flow charts aren't the only tool in the concept and planning phase; user scenarios also help to chart the user's experience on the site.

"User scenarios are another important design tool," Miller said. "They're little narratives that describe how a typical user might go through the site. For example, if we know there are three key audiences for the site, we will write three or more scenarios that work out how a representative user would use the site."

User scenarios include how users initially find the site, what their goals are in using it, the path they take and the tasks they accomplish on the site, and the messages they carry away.

"Scenarios are not necessarily used on every project, but they're very helpful when you're trying to puzzle out an unknown interaction," Miller added. "They're especially good for exploring something that's muddled or unfamiliar because they reveal the details that can get overlooked at the outset. When you think about the interaction in a detailed, step-by-step fashion, the little details tend to come out."

In the second phase, design specification and prototype, storyboards and workflow diagrams accompany the existing flowcharts and user scenarios. At the end of the second phase, the client signs off on everything, from visual style to media types, and editorial tone to final flowchart. From the final flow chart and production matrix, vivid knows exactly how many pages the site has. And by using a production matrix, vivid lists every single element for each of the site's pages.

So You Wanna Be an Information Designer?
Though she didn't have a name for what she was doing, Miller's been an information architect for a long time.

"I probably labored over the layout of my term papers more than any other English major," Miller said. "When I was in college, I studied both writing and graphic design. For me, it didn't make sense to separate the two."

Wanting to wear many hats, she worked in a small design firm and, later, moved into user interface design. Eventually, she landed at vivid in November 1993. Though she was initially hired as a writer, she created the company's first site in early 1994.

"Since I was the only person writing HTML, I was the de facto information designer," Miller said.

By 1995, vivid changed its focus from CD-ROMs to the Web. As the Web grew in complexity, Miller (who is also vivid's webmistress), was no longer able to wear all the Web hats. She eventually focused her attention on information design, informally studying with vivid co-founder Nathan Shedroff (himself a student of renowned information architect Richard Saul Wurman).

In addition, Miller takes her knowledge about information design to the community. Since 1996, she's taught "Information Design for the Web" at San Francisco State University's Multimedia Studies Program.

Structure Behind Creativity
Though information designers often come from the library sciences, Miller demonstrates that they also come from truly multidisciplinary backgrounds. A passion for what holds sites together, not just their code and pixels, builds a good information designer.