[Sigia-l] Open-source IA tool in the making

[jacco at nieuwland.net]

Hi,

As I've mentioned in a a previous thread, I've built something myself. This was
created out of frustration with the difficulty in communicating our
deliverables with the the client as well as internally. We used to create
screenflows in a Visio document, and wireframes in one or more seperate Visio
documents. This resulted in seperate files with stacks of screensflows and
stacks of wireframes, and getting a feel for the connections and actual
application/website interaction was difficult.

So, I came up with a way to integrate those deliverables into something that was
clickable, and presented that at the IA Summit 2 years ago (J-Flow, together
with Peter Boersma). Of course, one of the things the client really wanted was
a prototype, which is an step further. With my new employer I have completely
rewritten the Visio stuff, and included prototype generation from the Visio
wireframes. I will show that at this IA Summit in a pooster.

One of the main drawbacks is of course the fact that this is all based on images
that are generated from Visio. We can fake navigation interaction, but there is
no real (data entry, etc) interaction with the user in this prototype. To
create a working prototype for a usability test session, we create a number of
instances for some of these screens, to fake data entry, error situations etc.

The solution works for now, but could definitely do with some major
improvements.

My wishlist:
1. It would be great to be able to use a Visio-like interface of drag-and-drop,
templates and stencils, to create wireframes, but then use that to generate a
true interactive page (HTML/XML/whatever). It should still be 'sketchy', not to
give the user/client the impression the app is almost finished.

2. Personally, I really like the way we have combined the screenflow and the
wireframes, and I would like such interactivity from the tool aswell. It allows
the user to zoom out and see the big picture, where in the website/web app is
this wireframe?

3. Allowing data in the prototype through XML sounds like a wonderful thing for
actual testing of the prototype.

4. Definitely need notes/annotation in there. The creator of the wireframe
should have the opportunity to add notes/comments to the wireframe. But it
could also be useful to let your client play with the wireframes and let then
add notes where things should eb changed/improved etc.


I'm curious about the model you are planning to use to create screenflows from
XML. What kind of objects do you plan on using (screens/subflows/decision
points/output/etc?). And how do you define different links between those
objects. I'm wondering whether one could use Visio as the front-end for your
tool (I know, lots of people use Omnigraffle or other software). I know that
Visio can generate XML, and it woudl definitely be possible to create XML on
the fly aswell, though macros.

Lots of ideas. Wouldn't this subject classify for a 'Birds of a Feather' session
at the Summit? Or will we not have enough people there to provide input for this
tool?

Cheers,

Jacco