Hello @dopamino,
Thank you for reading my process and sharing your feedback.
For a long time, I am working as a single designer, so I customise the process based on the difficulties I faced. And the current version is an evolved version from 2005.
During college time (2005-09) I was into designing and programming. But design is something that I discovered myself and made it and practice. And on the other side programming, I got motivated by a lot of programmers and books in the library. So my programming was structure and process oriented, because of the books and magazines. And I never read any design books. Instead, I scan pictures of a lot of coffee table books, ad boards, magazine, and try to memorise the style, patterns, fonts, colours, etc.
As I progressed more in programming, I started realising that I can use a lot of programming techniques and concepts to structure an interface. So I started tweaking a lot of traditional programming concepts like UML, OOPS and Modular Programming, BEM, for designing works.
I used UML for interaction flow now replaced by DoGo. OOPS, Modular and BEM for Information Architecture, Components, Layout, later collectively I called Component Thinking.
Component thinking is a technique formed to deduce cluster of information from the heap. Same way you do it when you are designing a software system. I can share a website which I’m redesigning right now and the Information maps I deduced out of the information for the new design
Old Website: http://pearsearch.org/
Information Maps deduced from the old website:
About the Map, from top the first tier represent the page, the second layer gives the sections/layout and other layers shows the page attributes and relation
New website - Staging: PeARS