UX Swimlanes

Luke Wroblewski posts his notes on UX Swimlanes presented at CanUX. This is an expanded and more visual version of traditional swimlane diagrams and I can imagine would really help to create shared understanding of key user scenarios.

Yvonne Shek of nForm provides some further information and a Visio template.

The strengths of the deliverable are:

1. Synthesis. It takes the UX, the business, the backend systems, and the story--and weaves each into a bird's eye view.
2. Simplicity. It makes the complex look simple, or simpler.
3. Improvement. It is a clear improvement over the traditional RUP business process modeling swimlanes, in terms of ease of use.
4. Communications. It helps the team talk about the "what" and "why." All the scenarios combined paint the entire story of the web app. The comics lane also help to communicate the "what" and "why" to management and business stakeholders (thanks to Kevin Cheng for the idea, and Kelly Mellings for the templates).
5. Facilitating the next step. I have already mentioned that Dennis was able to go directly into wireframing after this document was completed. The set of wireframes that Dennis produced out of these were much like the end product. He stared at the Swimlane doc for a few days, et voila: Iteration 1 of the wireframes!