[Sigia-l] 3-D workflows

[George Olsen]

Lord, Ralph said:
> I'm looking for info on whether Visio or another Windows app (sorry, no
> Macs here) will let me create 3-D workflows.

This might not require an actual 3D program as much as a 2D program that
can create psuedo-3D views and has some interactive capabilities.
>
>   If I could stack the flows up (like a 3-level chessboard) and show the
> contact points as lines between planes, it might be clearer how the
> individual flows are related.

Something like this...

<http://www.interactionbydesign.com/presentations/site_structure.pdf>

It's actually done using Macromedia Freehand (although it could just as
easily be done in Illustrator, possibly even Visio). There's a bit of
upfront math involved to figure out the skews/rotations, plus the offsets,
but once that's figured out, it really didn't take much longer than a
normal site structure map.

The thing I like about isometric views is it does seem to help people see
to whole rather than the part.

> Of course, I'd like the planes in the big
> picture view to be linked to the individual flow docs for easy editing
> and updating.  Anyone know of such a thing?

Freehand's got a neat tool that might do this for you. (Don't know if
Illustrator has something comparable.) If you create a box, you can choose
"lens" fill. Then choose "magnify" (magnification can be changed as
needed, even to 1x). Position the box over the thing you'd like tracked
and check the "snapshot" option. Now we you move your box somewhere else,
it'll still display the snapshotted contents, which will automatically
update if the original changes.

Freehand can also create multi-page documents, so you can put different
diagrams on diffent pages. Since you probably will want to save stuff to
PDFs for clients, you could use Acrobat's ability to hotlink pages.
(Freehand also allows you to embed URLs into documents, but I've never
tried exporting this via PDF).

Since Freehand also has good integration with Flash, you could also try
exporting to Flash to put in the interactive linking. It's something I've
thought about, but never actually got around to doing.

Incidently, it would be hard to do isometic views in PowerPoint, but it's
got the ability to do basic hyperlinking. The big disadvantage is that you
can't control the appearance of the buttons. But I've found it useful for
doing quick on-screen and interactive wireframe tests.

_____________________________________________________________________
George Olsen                           george at interactionbydesign.com
User Experience Architect                                310-993-0467