[Sigia-l] iRise - round 2

[steve.schang at wachovia.com]

I recently used iRise to develop two prototypes. We also had the 
opportunity to usability test both prototypes.

iRise in a nutshell: There are two parts, a requirements management piece 
(iRise Online) and a simulation development environment (iRise Studio). 
iRise Online allows a project team to collaborate on requirements. It 
seems fairly robust, however I did not get to use it that much.  iRise 
Studio is a development environment that allows you to model business 
processes, IAs, and application flows and create fairly interactive 
prototypes. My comments are about iRise Studio.

Here is what I liked: 
* Usability testing in iRise worked very well. 
* Showing the iRise simulations to the project team was extremely 
effective at defining and redefining requirements. The team could really 
relate to seeing a functioning prototype of the application rather than 
seeing Visio wireframes or lists of requirements.
* Once the initial simulation was created it was not that difficult to 
make changes based on project team feedback and usability feedback.
* The help system had a lot of examples. (You will need them.)
* We did not need any IT resources to create the simulations.

Here are some things that I learned about iRise after working with it:
* The iRise website says they developed it for non-technical business 
analysts and that it is as easy as creating slides in PowerPoint. I would 
recommend anybody who is going to develop simulations have some basic 
programming knowledge, understand basic database concepts (especially if 
you are going to create dynamic content), and understand HTML. It's not as 
easy as PowerPoint!
* iRise Studio uses a client server concept. When you are developing a 
simulation, nothing is stored locally on your machine. Everything is 
stored on the server. I found this created slow response times for doing 
very common tasks like dragging and dropping. 
*Using variables to store information is necessary when creating complex 
simulations. iRise does not manage variables very well. Instead of 
remembering what variables you have already used you have to remember the 
exact name of each variable. This really got frustrating when I would have 
dozens of variables in a simulation. 
*  There seems to be a lot of little things about the UI that are annoying 
and when added together make it a very frustrating experience: no global 
find and replace; when you make a copy of a simulation (i.e. you want to 
create a second version) iRise will copy all the pages but not the 
underlying logic on those pages;  embedding a hyperlink in a paragraph of 
text requires the creation of at least three individual text objects (all 
the text prior to the link, an object for the link, and then all the text 
after the link) you don't just highlight the text you want to link. There 
are many others.
* Don't use iRise to create an IA. Something like Visio is much easier to 
use, has more functionality, and look better when you print it.

With all that said, I do see benefits in using iRise for creating 
prototypes. The prototype  was most helpful in fleshing out project 
requirements and for usability testing. Also we did not need to use IT 
resources to create the prototype.  I think that the requirements 
management in iRise Online will tie in nicely with iRise Studio. However, 
plan on a very steep, and often painful learning curve, to get up to speed 
with iRise Studio

Steve Schang




Listera <listera at rcn.com> 
Sent by: sigia-l-admin at asis.org
08/25/2004 11:40 PM


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SIGIA-L <sigia-l at asis.org>
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Subject
[Sigia-l] iRise - round 2






There's been some discussion here about six months ago on iRise as an
IA/ID/prototyping tool:

<http://tinyurl.com/3u6nq>

Does anyone have anything more recent to add, either installed or as demo?

----
Ziya

Is it easier to reject a good solution or accept a bad one?



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