While on a contract recently, I learned how to use Omnigraffle. During the entire time on my contract, I switched between Omingraffle and Visio (running in Parallels) depending on which project I was working on. I will say that using Visio in parallels was a pain. It was slow and killed the performance of my system although it could just be that I was using an older powermac laptop. Also, a lot of Visio keyboard shortcuts didn't work in Parallels (zooming with the mouse scroll wheel anyone?)
I really enjoyed using Omnigraffle and loved how easy it was to use to create compelling artifacts. Here is a list of some things I particularly found better in Omnigraffle than in Visio: 1. Selecting various page details is easier (you don't have to encompass the whole thing with the selection box as in Visio). 2. Multiple layers and shared layers are much better (instead of having a number of different Visio pages as backgrounds). Also, being able to easily lock down a layer is great as well. 3. In documents with a lot of pages (canvases in OG), the navigation between pages is a lot easier using the left hand Canvas list as opposed to the Visio tabs (uggggghhh!) 4. The ever present workspace dialogs in OG makes editing page elements a lot faster. It's much better than Visio's multi-tabbed window dialogs and multi-level context menus. 5. Aligning elements is easier and the ability to specify a specific sized space between elements is really cool. However, the Visio shape distribution feature is awesome and I think that is something missing in OG. 6. Creating sitemaps in OG is extremely easy thanks to the outlining feature which allows you to type an outline which is simultaneously created visually (with connection and everything). This saves a lot of time when creating complicated sitemaps. However, the way OG deals with configuring connection points and the manipulation of connectors is a little weird and imprecise and I can be pretty anal so this drives me crazy. 7. The ability in OG to create Clickable PDF prototypes is awesome but I wished that it supported other actions than just linking to another page (canvas). In one wireframe I was working on, I had some show and hide layer actions specified to demonstrate modal windows and the process of selecting a drop down menu item to create a list item filter. However, I had to create multiple pages for these actions instead so that my clickable prototype worked. This makes going throught the PDF page by page a little more difficult because of all the extra pages. On the whole, I find OG easier and faster to use. It might not be as full featured as Visio but do we need or even use all those additional features in creating UX/IA artifacts? I doubt it. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=38871 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
