Why is it important that the data or information get back to them?
How is your interaction/science translation strategy going to change depending on your audience (e.g. youth vs. citizen scientist vs. other researchers)
Who is affected by the research that done and how does communication of that research important to the relationship between researcher and the affected?
Are there current/historical dynamics/relationships that change how your work is perceived/received within the community? (e.g. many community partners facilitate or are affected by the research being done in their territory, but rarely are the recipients of the information).
is it a tool for an audience to use or an educational/informative piece?
How much curation are you looking to do? Is the project about exploration or directed/guided tour?
What is the takeaway? is there a call to action?
How do you make sure to conduct information communication in an ethical and respectful way (e.g. consent from the community)
the time scale:
Are you communicating about work that has been done in the past? is being done now? will be done in the future?
Can the project be built upon over time? Is it a one-off?
In the past?
has it been published? Where? Is it accessible?
why is it relevant now / how do you make it relevant?
is it a proof of concept? or prototype/sketch of an idea?
seeking contribution? funding?
The scale of self:
What do you get out of communicating research? Is it to learn a new skill, test a new technology, engage in a new topic/new community?
Is it a portfolio project? Educational resource / reference material?
How can you use it as an exercise or moment to practice the design process? How do you work iteratively and intelligently?
How do you document your process and make it readable?
On prototyping:
Wireframe and sketch early and often and refine - get feedback from you audience and collaborators
this will help guiding the content (e.g. text, design assets) - which in most cases will be the major bottleneck
In terms of planning - technically and conceptually, you grow with each project, being strategic about the technical and conceptual needs of the various projects can be helpful for dedicating the necessary brain power for the project at hand.
Define some rules - to keep coherency:
fonts, font sizes
color palette
maintain the grid - of course you can break it sometimes, but still!
Get it up to 20% - for a first iteration, get it up to the 20% point where you can begin to play with interaction and flow. This is maybe what I'd call the proof of concept stage of the prototype.
( Specific point: build the app/data viewer first, then the page out second. The app/dataviewer might give you insight into your project that you hadn't before. Then again, maybe the app is the bottleneck and turns into a blocking point... just something to think about in terms of development order. Then again, if you can write the infrastructure for the project and "inject" the necessary pieces after, then that could be a good compromise, though it takes some idea of architecting the project in a modular way which isn't trivial.)
On mobile friendliness?
It depends, getting hung up on mobile friendly design can be a huge pain and bottleneck, but then again is really rewarding since a lot of web traffic comes through via mobile.
I have friends that just want to build the thing and say, "deal with mobile later"
Ideas