[Sigia-l] Visio not usable?

[prai at prady.com]

Chris Chandler wrote -

> By any chance did you learn Freehand (or Illustrator for that matter)
> before learning Visio? In my experience, people tend to feel very
> attached (or perhaps just competent and comfortable) in the program they
> first learn.

Probably true. Likewise people who have to teach a tool 50 times may
confuse the issue of 'leanability' and 'usability' too.

Probably, it is pointless to recall which one 'I' tried learning first,
however undoubtedly it was Freehand, since (Aldus) freehand existed way
before Visio surfaced in market. The point is not which one 'I' learn
first. It is less about opinion. As a matter of fact, I focus on 'Design'.
I pick the tool which can help me translate my design and allow me to make
logical progression towards the final product.

Come to think of it, why you teach your students doing 'Sitemaps'? To
learn 'Visio'? Or to understand the IA and to evolve the final
apps/website? Building sitemap has less relation with what tool you use to
'illustrate' it. The purpose of 'Visio' as you are advocating is just to
draw picture of Sitemap. Educate me if I am missing something here.

While the efforts spend at this time (to illustrate the sitemap) must be
used for better purposes, is what 'Freehand' can allow better. I do it
most often (and I have seen many people doing it) that you can use most of
the 'artifacts' from the site map to build 'prototypes' or the actual
interface elements. Freehand connects pritty well with other applications
such as Illustrator, PhotoShop, Flash, etc... so to make better trasition
towards final product. It is also good for many things which has been
discussed here before - Isomatric Sitemaps is one such recent topic.

>> But it is the worth investing your time learning 'Freehand'
>> 'cos it will do 10 more things for you, and will connect with 10 more
>> applications seamlessly.
>
> That's an interesting statement! And I'm curious -- what 10 more things
> will it do for me, and which 10 more applications will it connect with
> seamlessly?

I don't want to repeat what has already been discussed by others about how
Freehand helps in multiple instances of design. Please follow the previous
posts for more. For this discussion, let's not be pragmatic. What I meant
is what has been debated here previously.. Why I say it is worth investing
in Freehand more is that it fits multiple times during the whole design
process of creating a final product - doing the site map, creating the
navigation/wireframes, designing/exporting UI widgets to other application
such as Photoshop, Flash, AI and helping the prototyping, etc.

The other 'sematic' expression of "connects with 10 more applications
seamlessly" was also that it interacts with the designers in a very known
fashion. One person who uses flash, director, dreamweaver, photoshop, AI
will find freehand extremely easy to use. Hence the 'learnability' of this
tool (Freehand) has clear advantage from where I see it.

I can see this discussion as turning more towards 'design methodology' or
'teaching philosophy'. It would be intersting if students are to be
observed after they have learned the course of IA or design to what they
actually prefer (over Visio or non-Visio tools) to use in their
profession. Probably, you must look at your students from this perspective
before lobbing their support for Visio. But if it is only about the
'Curriculum', I can understand your stand.

My another penny.

Pradyot Rai