[Sigia-l] visio feature improvements

[John O'Donovan-INTERNET]

> Two problems I foresee: 
> 1) Auto-connecting lines for flowcharts and sitemaps (but again, I
> foresee Visio for wireframing mostly)
> 2) Printing (but I usually present my work digitally anyway, as PDF'd
> Visio docs)

> Has anyone else tried this?

Hi Chris,

Yep - I use Flash for Prototyping. e.g. the example I did for Miriam
recently...

http://www.jod.clara.net/test/interaction1.html

To ensure users and clients understand exactly what you intend, it is often
quicker to draw it up than to try and explain your concepts with static
diagrams.

It works a treat and is very fast to put examples together. Exactly as you
said Chris, you can use the library to build up a selection of objects to
use in your prototypes and can make them interactive. This is especially
useful when using design patterns, whereby you can drop in components to
represent certain interaction patterns that are standard or repeated (e.g.
dialogs). Because the library uses copies (or instances) of objects you can
also change something in one place and it will change everywhere it is used
- even in different flash files if you use a centralised library file.

We have also used Director for advanced prototyping but that requires a
greater investment of time.

On point 1) Flash is not the best tool for flowcharts and sitemaps - you
could do it and with some scripting even make it possible to do intelligent
autoconnecting but it would be easier to use Visio or a tool that does this
off the shelf, being pragmatic.

On point 2), Flash can provide printing capabilities in two ways. Print
exactly what is on screen or to access a print routine that can print what
you want it to print. 

As an example of when this might be useful, imagine you have an interactive
prototype that the user is playing with. When they get to a certain point
they can hit a print button which not only prints what is on screen but
labels the screen and all the elements on it on the printout.

See...

http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/ts/documents/printing_from_browsers.
htm
(supported from version 4 onwards...)

Overall it's maybe not an approach for everyone, but if you know how to
build things in Flash or are prepared to learn it does kick ass and can add
a lot of value to your designs.

Cheers,

jod


 



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