Roles and Responsibilities for Sign and Metaphors Requirements

In this lesson, you will learn which of the design team members are most involved with signs and metaphors.
To illustrate a team's roles and responsibilities during this process, we've re-introduced WebTeam, the Web design team hired to complete Asteron's Web site design project. You were able to tour each WebTeam member's workspace in the previous module. To see what responsibilities the WebTeam groups have in relation to signs and metaphors, roll your cursor over each of the Business, Creative, and Technical groups:

Works with client to obtain client's business objectives and to determine target audiences and audience needs. Business objectives and audience needs will guide decisions about signs and metaphors.

• Creative Team: Designs and develops signs and metaphors for the site based on client and user needs. Creative roles use Human-Computer Interface guidelines, design judgment, and the latest tools in the creation of signs and metaphors.
• Business Team: Provides technical expertise to implement signs and metaphors on the Web site. The technology underlying a Web site plays a supporting role in the storage and delivery of signs and metaphors.

The technical team often works in collaboration with clients to understand and align with various aspects of the project, including:

1. Business Objectives: The technical team needs to understand the client's business objectives to ensure that the solutions they develop are not only technically sound but also strategically aligned with what the client aims to achieve. This might involve discussions about market position, growth strategies, operational efficiencies, or specific business challenges that need technological solutions.
2. Target Audiences and Audience Needs: Understanding the target audience is crucial for developing user-centric solutions. This involves identifying who the end-users are, their demographics, behaviors, preferences, and pain points. The technical team might work with or alongside user experience (UX) researchers, product managers, or marketing teams to gather this information. This ensures that the technology developed meets the actual needs of the users, enhancing usability, adoption, and ultimately, the success of the product or service.

This collaboration typically involves:

• Requirement Gathering Sessions: Meetings where the client outlines their goals and the technical team asks questions to clarify needs and expectations.
• Workshops or Joint Application Development (JAD) Sessions: These are more structured interactions where stakeholders, including the client, come together to define system requirements.
• User Personas and Scenarios: Creation of detailed profiles of the target users to guide development decisions.
• Feedback Loops: Continuous or periodic check-ins where the client can review progress, provide feedback, and ensure the project remains on track with their objectives.
• Prototyping and MVP (Minimum Viable Product): Building early versions of the product to test with real users or stakeholders for feedback.

The involvement of the technical team in these aspects might vary depending on the project's scope, the organization's structure, and the specific role of the technical team within the project lifecycle. However, in modern, agile development environments, this kind of collaboration is increasingly common to ensure that technical solutions are both feasible and beneficial for the client's business goals and audience needs.

When we grow up with a medium we do not need metaphors. None of us ever needed an explanation of how face-to-face communication^[1] works, we simply lived its use. None of us ever needed an explanation of how a telephone works, what we can use it for, or what how we should behave when using one. We grew up watching others use a telephone, made use of telephones ourselves, later with a growing competence, and finally with sufficient facility that we simply assume its use and characteristics. It is only when we seek to understand new media that we need metaphors. Metaphor, under such circumstances, is to understanding what a kickboard is to swimming, a convenient support that gets us started. A good metaphor uses the essential characteristics of a metaphoric referent to inform the essential characteristics of the unfamiliar subject. It provides a set of familiar signposts that help to make an unfamiliar territory initially comprehensible; to operate somewhat effectively in unfamiliar waters. The value of such "signpost" metaphors is limited. The same kickboard that that provides convenient support when we are learning to swim becomes an encumbrance once we have learned how. Indeed, experienced swimmers often use kickboards as a "drag" that forces them to exercise harder. If the task of this paper was to introduce emerging electronic media using metaphor, the task would be straightforward. The use of metaphor is much more detailed than can be satisfied by simple characteristic-oriented metaphors. Finding precedent for regulating new media in the rights and responsibilities associated with established media requires analysis that goes well beyond surface characteristics. We must be able to take are metaphors deep into the fundamental operation of our metaphoric media. Hence it is likely, especially given the new combinations of media characteristics that the computer enables, that no established medium will be entirely adequate to the job of describing the rights and responsibilities that should be associated with a new medium. It may be that, for at least some electronic media, there will be no substitute for the experience of directly participating in the medium.

The range of rights and responsibilities conventionally associated with media.

1. the media roles in which these rights and responsibilities are vested.
2. the range of emerging electronic (computer) media.
3. a theoretical perspective, "medium as process" that describes five spheres of invention -- mediators, characteristics, uses, effects, and practices, which interact to create and reinvent a medium.
4. the rather indirect relationship between the realm of metaphor (characteristics) and the realm of rights and responsibilities (practice).
5. a formal typology of media, grounded in "medium as process" that describes the relationships between media in a "media space". It will be argued from theory and example that this media space describes both competitions between media that lead typologically similar media to adopt similar practices, and unexplored areas where highly distinctive media might evolve.
6. six clusters of established media, including interactive media, art media, correspondence media, publishing media, telephonic media, and broadcast media.
7. a single vector of computer media that stretches through previously unoccupied areas of media space between these clusters of established media. Most of these computer media flank, but cluster with, one or another of these established clusters.
8. for each cluster, the associated roles, the rights and responsibilities associated with each role, the computer media currently associated with the cluster, and likely new computer mediated competitors to established media in that cluster.
9. for computer conferencing, the associated roles, the rights and responsibilities associated with each role, and the computer media that are likely to join it in being highly distinct from established media.
10. It will be concluded that, although most current computer media should be highly similar to their established within-cluster competitors in terms of roles, rights, and responsibilities, that there are at least some computer media, including computer conferences and electronic bulletin boards, that clearly differ from established media and must be evaluated on the basis of actual experience of the medium.

Web Team members in the Business group acquire information such as client documents, audience analysis, and market research. The information about client and user needs will shape the team's decisions regarding signs and metaphors. WebTeam members in the Creative group have the primary responsibility for creating signs and metaphors in a Web site development project. The iGeneration job titles that are directly responsible for creating signs and metaphors are:

1. Visual Designer
2. Creative Producer

Other jobs or individuals who are often involved in creating or validating signs and metaphors include:

1. Creative Director
2. Editor/Content Developer
3. Media Designer/ Interactive Designer
4. Marketing Manager
5. Clients and Users

Now that you know who is responsible for developing signs and metaphors, the next lesson will describe the process for getting the job done.

[1] Face-to-face interaction: Face-to-face interaction (face-to-face communication) is a concept in sociology, linguistics, media and communication describing social interaction carried out from one person to another without any mediating technology.