[Sigia-l] Re: Sigia-l digest, Vol 1 #765 - 12 msgs

[HK Dunston]

Hi there

> I like the idea of this application, and I really like the wireframe
> rocks for a brand. I'm having a hard time seeing the demo on my
> design computer or finding a working beta on the site though. Anyone
> seen a copy working?

I saw a demo of this last week -- iRise built a prototype for one of my
clients to demonstrate the software. They came to the session with the
prototype built and made several changes during the meeting. My reactions to
the software (and the company) were these:

1. iRise explicitly markets itself as a tool for business analysts. I
actually asked at the end why they weren't working w/ design and development
firms and they gently explained that they thought their product would be too
expensive. One of the things that came up several times in the demo was the
need to actually think through the design of  the prototype before building
it... their sales pitch seemed to gloss over that issue. One of the client
business analysts actually said, "but wouldn't you need an IA to use this?"

2. the requirements gathering thing seemed incredibly useful -- it seems
much easier to coordinate multiple people working on UI specs, especially
since you can output everything into a document after final sign off. It's
much more effective for developers to have printed specs, in my experience.
Not having to deal with ms word, formatting, connecting requirements with
storyboard elements, etc seems pretty rad to me. Of course, I haven't
actually seen the output...

3. My review of the actual laying out of pages and building in business
logic tools is mixed. Some things seemed very useful. For example, their
sitemapping tool lets you diagram out process flows and actually build pages
and links at the same time. You can build in links to decisions that lead to
different pages depending on variables, etc. On the other hand, the laying
out of pages seemed very clunky -- not a good sign when the person laying
things out actually works for iRise. Part of the clunkiness comes from the
fact that it's more than just a storyboarding tool -- you can actually make
pages that look like/are html, build in gifs, etc. They claim that you can
end up with exportable html (if you switch out of wysiwyg mode) but I
suspect there'd be a lot of cleaning up required. Basically, it looks like
it would be a lot more work to do something simple but that work might be
worth it if you were building something complex.

4. One of iRise's big claims is that you can demonstrate the way a page
would actually work, with "real" data. I can see this being really important
in some cases. If your interest is documentation and communication with
developers, you probably don't really need this -- as long as you can
describe what is supposed to happen clearly. If you need to spend a lot of
time working with client-types, you might really appreciate being able to
let them try to add a new item to a list or whatever. My client was
impressed when the iRise demonstrator changed info about a person and then
showed that the changed info appeared on the next page. Letting a client
review a prototype (or simulation, as they call it) is obviously preferable
to waiting for the actual site to be built and then editing code. Of course,
in that case you will have to deal with the "I don't understand. It works
just like you said. Why do we need to spend 3 months building it?" comments
that will follow.

Overall, I'd love to be able to play around with it more. I'm not sure that
it is something I'd adopt for everything but I can definitely see it being
useful when you're building something complex for clients that have a hard
time visualizing how things work. Of course, the expense will limit its
usage as well. You'd probably have to be working on something fairly
high-impact to justify the cost.

--hk