[Sigia-l] Diagramming tools?

[Stew Dean]

On 4/5/07, Ziya Oz <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:

> If in fact Visio is the 'obvious industry standard' and thus reflects the
> current state of the art, so to speak, we're all in trouble. Technology and
> design have moved on from wireframes, static pictures, site-maps, the page
> paradigm, etc. That's so last century. And so inadequate in the era of fast
> prototyping, interactivity, dynamic apps, Ajax, mobile devices, declarative
> language driven UIs and so on.

The concept of creating a prototype is good and recommended in many
cases but has problems. First up you run into the danger of
approaching the user interface form an overly technical point of view.
Why is this bad?  Well quite simply instead of thinking of the user
journeys, about what the user wants and starting from a technical
level you run a huge danger of thinking 'I saw this great ajax app
that allowed me to flip pages, let's use that'. You can end up using
lots of arbitrary elements that just look cool. In most cases a good
user experience is about keeping things as simple as possible,
reducing the amounts of button presses and the visual noise. New
techniques for updating pages on the fly really help and I now use
these a lot but I don't get bogged down in how it's done.  I was
taught in university to use time in my interfaces and now can do that
on the web. It's not Ajax or Flash but a time based interface. Many
Web 2.0 interfaces are currently as unusable as Web 0.1 beta
interfaces, often due to lack of context and relying on assumed
knowledge.

If you have to code up your solution you can become  focused on the
bells and whistles not the core use experience.  For example some may
become fixated on personalisation because that's part of the CMS tool
kit, when really it's just targeting customers that can be done using
the sites navigation!  You can also assume that the user wants more
power tools than they need. Again customisable pages are a indication
of this.  I recently worked with a IA who had clearly come from a
technical background. His dream for an intranet was to have lots of
customisable pages, that way the user could create the site they
wanted.  Problem is that's a lot of hard work on the part of the user,
they have go through a sharp learning curve to understand what they
can add, you have to do a lot of hard work to create ways they can
find the content they need and you start becoming very reliant on
having a great search.  Search becomes the primary navigation tool in
this case.  Awful IA work.

There are very good reasons to diagram first before rushing to code.
Now if there was a way diagrams could be transformed into prototypes
that's great.  I used to use Flash for this and I still recommend it.
Other tools are available but appear to be very 'drag a widget'
orientated, not sure they will allow me to prototype up some of the
new interface elements I use.

I'm sure someone will come up with a way to appease both of us but so
far I havnt see you suggest a solution.  How do you prototype your
sites? What are the weaknesses of the process and in what types of
projects  does your process work best?  Can you see a time when a
diagram is better than a prototype?

Stew Dean

-- 
Stewart Dean