John Maeda, currently president of RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), came up with a process called SLIP: Sort, Label, Integrate, and Prioritize. It's a tool he uses whenever confronted with a ton of information that needs organizing.

In short, it's an evolved version of the Post-It notes method of organizing content.

The Post-It Notes method

Interested in SLIP?
Fortunately, John and company were able to turn this process into an online application that's free to use. Yes, FREE.

What the online version of SLIP addresses that the physical version of Post-It Notes doesn't is the idea of collaboration with someone that does not work in your immediate area. Perhaps there are a bunch of other ways of handling this with online apps such as Basecamp, but here's one approach that me and a fellow designer are experimenting with at Penton Media.

How to Collaborate with SLIP
Requirements: tinyURL.com (recommended), SLIP App, internet access (duh), and a blog with comments enabled

So basically, me and a co-worker are reworking the content organization of a site. We started off with the content groupings as suggested by the client below:

1. News, Reviews, Community
2. Forums, Blogs, Email Newsletters, FAQs, Code
3. Events, White Papers, Web seminars, Downloads, Essential Guides, eBooks
4. ITTV, IT Job Hound, Bookstore (Name TBD)
5. Register, Log-In, Subscribe, Customer Service/Contact Us
6. RSS, Mobile Edition

After dumping all of this into SLIP, I saved the URL and linked to it in a new blog entry solely dedicated to this process. 

SLIP populated with suggested organization

Now when my co-worker takes his turn in rearranging the content, all he has to do is click on the link and then start SLIP-ing. Afterwards, he replies to the blog entry with a link to his updated rearrangement of content. Again, the link will be awfully long so tinyURL-ing it will make it more visually digestable. If you are trying this at home, it's probably best to also leave a comment in regards to why and what you did in your version.

After going over his SLIP, I would then click on his link and make whatever changes I feel needs to be made. And so, the process goes on until an agreement is reached between both designers.

Advantages
1. With this approach, there's a 'paper trail' left behind showing the steps that the team took in reaching a goal.
2. It's FREE.

Disadvantages
1. May be tedious copying and pasting URLs into and out of tinyURL.com. 

Credits
Check out John Maeda's book, The Laws of Simplicity. I HIGHLY recommend it and consider it to be my version of the 'Bible'. It's a short, 100-page read packed with a ton of inspiration. I've read it twice already and plan on rereading it again to keep my design ethics from becoming excessively bulky especially on the web.

"Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful." - Maeda

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.