[Sigia-l] Life after Visio

[Adrian Howard]

(Belated response that's been sitting on my laptop while I waited for a 
new power supply to arrive :-)

On Wednesday, August 6, 2003, at 08:20  pm, Gothelf, Jeff wrote:
[snip]
> I am curious though. Does it seem like the smaller design shops (and UX
> groups within smaller organizations) and freelancers tend to stray 
> from the
> Visio/HTML options leaning more towards the tools that Ziya mentions? 
> Or
> does it have nothing to do with size of the organization and is simply 
> the
> IA's preference?

Personal anecdotes alert:

Most of my IA work is freelance with smaller organisations. It has been 
my experience that smaller shops don't use Visio nearly as much as 
larger organisations. I see a lot more Freehand MX, Flash, Dreamweaver, 
OmniGraffle and Powerpoint (even Photoshop!) than Visio. A few reasons 
come to mind:

-	Cost: A Visio licence is seen as an unnecessary expense when there 
are internal tools that can already do the job (even if they are, 
arguably, less effective). Even if a tool needs to be purchased Visio 
is at the top-end of the price list.

-	Effectiveness: I would argue that some of the above (especially 
OmniGraffle) are actually better for IA tasks than Visio - so why pick 
an inferior piece of software.

-	Time: The time taken to get up to speed with Visio may not be worth 
while in the context of a one-off project. Even if using a less 
appropriate piece of software like Photoshop may be less effective in 
the long term.

-	Platform: There is a fair proportion of smaller shops that don't have 
MS Windows as their mandated platform. This makes looking at 
alternatives to Visio more practical. Cross-platform solutions like 
Flash are even more attractive.

For larger organisations these aren't really issues. The cost of a 
couple of Visio licences is minor in the context of a large IT budget. 
Especially since you probably already have a hefty MS oriented software 
policy. Cross-platform options are not an issue since you have a 
mandated platform/software for the organisation as a whole. Visio is a 
"de facto" standard and can do the job. Searching for an even more 
useful piece of software probably isn't worth the effort.

As a freelancer my tool of choice is now OmniGraffle. I used Visio for 
a couple of years, but OmniGraffle makes doing those tasks I do a lot 
simpler. Since I can export OmniGraffle into any format my client might 
require (including Visio) I might as well pick a tool that makes me 
more efficient. As ever YMMV.

Adrian