Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

Martin blogged about our amazing Information Architecture Indesign Template System earlier this year.

Cool Idea: Wireframes with Active Code

It is a set of Indesign documents and objects that allow for the rapid building of anything found in the online style guide. Extreme Wireframing is how I like to think of it.

We had a release of the InDesign Template System in early June and even since then the value keeps increasing. Publishers request the highly detailed documentation, the library of site sections documented continues to grow through the hard work and partnership of EightShapes (who also built the system). Other vendors we work with like OIC and Hot Studio are able to utilize our design system and build with these tools. They've done some interesting things to inform the tools as well. Having a tool like this has also made it clear where partner vendors could try to push the style guide in meaningful ways. It's hard for team members to come in from the outside and build on the system, but this documentation system makes it relatively quick to get up to speed.

We are slowly extending the usage of the tool to more designers. We are also going to be moving some of our documentation for commerce into this system so those pieces will be there to leverage in the future.

It's really key to document the system so that content creators don't have to continue to reinvent the wheel. It creates a single documentation language-the style guide- for our work. That's no small thing and it feels like we are getting closer and closer.

Creating this tool for designing experiences on sun.com has simplified communication. We still have some work to do but we're seeing results. There is too much content to be able to address each piece in a custom manner. This allows more attention to the differences.

Until this documentation is complete, we are, as my esteemed colleague Chris H. says, 'negotiating the gaps'. It's a really interesting puzzle from a design perspective. It's also not short term. The team has worked on the core of the system for years. Andrew P. has a really good story about that.

I'm sure there will be more to the template story as well as the overall styleguide. I'll continue to keep the blog updated as our progress moves us along, hopefully I can get others to chime in as well.