[Sigia-l] Wireframe/Prototyping tools (was RE:Intelligentsigns atMicrosof t)

[David Carruthers]

hey Jonathon

JBB
> > > Of all the tools on the market today, I'd say Axure has the most
> > > promise as an "IDE for IAs"...

Ziya
> > I'm curious about your endorsement. Is there more to it in
> > action than what appears at their site?

We've just bought an axure license and i'm really impressed with it.

It's no slower than using visio or freehand, or any of the other many
many many tools out there that have become semi-standard.

The ability to create wireframes/prototypes not bound by physical page
sizes, in real HTML, with annotations/documentation, interactivity on
the page showing states etc means i can communicate my ideas far more
quickly with both clients and the technical team.

And when working on improvements to an existing site, rather than
something newly designed, the ability to screen grab import large
chunks of existing pages, then set up styles to dovetail in the newly
proposed elements speeds up idea generation/destruction alot. Letting
you see what doesn't work far more quickly.

The output to Word document is quite clunky, but not useless. You
can't press a button and forget about it, but you can press a button
and produce a document that will do a lot of formatting work for you,
and be very usable with a bit of tinkering.

I realise that all of this can be done with other tools (ref: your
fireworks/word combo), but none gathered together in one tool so far
(i say this as someone who had high hopes for freehand flash outputs,
and used visio HTML outputs a lot, never used Omnigraffle)

caveat: I am probably still in honeymoon period with it, yet to find
it's many and variate flaws and have only used it on smallish projects
so far which need a quicker turn around and using an in house
development team. It'll get a bigger test soon with a far bigger site,
and external development team.

It's not perfect, but it is a really useful tool, and steadily
improving/seeking feedback.

dvc

p.s. i'd love to try iRise, but it's cost does seem prohibitive.
around 20x the price of axure i think.