jonnymac blog » A Website Named Desire

A Website Named Desire

September 15, 2008 at 4:48 pm · Filed under Design Inspiration, Experience Design, Microsoft, Visual Thinking, XPLANE

Those who know me and/or read this blog know I'm a fairly large Flash platform fanboy. So it may come as a surprise I am blogging about a project recently completed here at XPLANE's Portland studio for Microsoft and their new suite of interactive production tools -- which includes Silverlight.

The project is called "A Website Named Desire" and we at XPLANE created a poster (note: not the related website built in Silverlight) of the entire process a typical agency would go through to create a large website. While the poster does not directly mention the Microsoft suite of tools, it does do an amazing job of showing the whole ecosystem in an engaging, visual storytelling manner. Fairly humorous, too -- be sure to spend some time checking out all the various little details.

If you'd like to check out the whole poster, you can download a PDF of it (6 MB) here, or visit Microsoft at one of the upcoming conferences where they will be presenting it. You can find a list of those conferences on the supporting website.

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Jacob said,

September 22, 2008 @ 3:45 pm

I am an Information Architect and I was wondering if your agency compiled the “cast of characters” or were they supplied by Microsoft? Also, I was wondering if you had contact information from the Microsoft staff, as would like to contact them regarding the poster?

Jon MacDonald said,

September 22, 2008 @ 3:50 pm

@Jacob - The cast of characters was created as part of the discovery process at XPLANE. So, I would say they were developed by XPLANE in conjunction with Microsoft.

I believe the best way to get in touch with the proper people who would be able to answer your questions about the poster would be to contact the twitter account they have setup at http://twitter.com/sitenameddesire.

Nishant Kothary said,

September 26, 2008 @ 10:16 am

@Jacob - We did some customer research earlier this year that led to a pretty cool diagram that presented a taxonomy of web roles. The diagram has around 50 roles. As Jon mentions, the discovery process that XPLANE conducted really helped us refine our thinking around how to tell this story while pinning down the final list of characters. Essentially, we halved it; several roles were rolled into one, while others were simply not depicted because they were too specialized.

Feel free to contact me with your questions. nishkoth [at] microsoft [dot] com.

JamieSanford.com » Day 2 of Web 2.0 Expo. said,

October 2, 2008 @ 11:01 am

[...] The exhibit hall was a good experience, my only issue with it is related to the booths that the funky & cool company names don’t necessarily tell me what they do and if I should stop to talk to them!Â The best swag, for me, was the “A Website Named Desire” poster.Â You can hear about it and check the PDF here. [...]

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