I agree. In my experience, any client who sees color and images focuses on whether they like that color or whether that image fits, and don't pay attention to the more important elements (at this stage in the process), which include the related issues of clarity of navigation, how easy it is for users to fulfill their goals, whether the most important tasks are readily findable, whether the page flow makes sense. This can and much more can all be done in wireframes (I use Visio) in a fraction of the time it takes to code it, which allows the client to provide feedback earlier and keeps me from going down a wrong path, while letting me know when I'm going down the right one. I can also make changes on-the-fly when meeting with clients so that we can immediately see how their suggestions might enhance or detract from the user experience. You can do this with FireWorks too, but here you have usually added color and images (unless people are making grayscale prototypes in FireWorks?) which detract from the team's and client's abillity to think objectively about the afore-mentioned critical elements. At least for me, making changes on-the-fly with HTML within the span of a meeting would be difficult! Speaking of hi-fidelity prototyping tools, has anyone used Silverlight extensively? Could you share your experiences?
Thanks, Courtney Jordan -----Original Message----- From: discuss-boun...@lists.interactiondesigners.com [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of Milan Guenther Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2009 8:11 AM To: Dave Malouf Cc: Forum Interaction Design Ixda Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] The future of Wireframes (was: Joel Spolsky claims the "Program Manager" role does UI design... ????) > 1st, I didn't say don't do storyboards. I did say don't do wireframes and > YES I do teach my students to work in interactive ALL the time. > Sketch > scenarios/storyboards (that are ALWAYS human situated; more on this > below) > low-fi interactive > hi-fi interactive So that means you start with interactive techniques directly, but still there is a phase where the "look" of what you are building is rather undefined / abstract. So Flash, Blend, Fireworks may not be the best choice of tools, right? I think they focus too much on visual/interactive details, and thus distract from the goal to quickly create a rough vision of the product. Besides, imho ALL interaction designers have to learn to code to be able to produce new visions of interactions on their own, but that's another story. -- milan guenther * interaction design ||| | | |||| || |||||||| | || | || +33 6 67 11 13 83 * www.guenther.cx ________________________________________________________________ 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 ________________________________________________________________ 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
