November 4th, 2008 – by ddimmick
Today we’re continuing our series on finding the best tool for creating wireframes, mockups, and designing interaction in a collaborative development environment. Since we’re primarily interested in solutions that fit the kind of fast and lean development environment we have at SitePen, we’re skipping some of the established solutions in favor of more down-to-earth software tools that are suitable for smaller teams and organizations.
Last time we reviewed OmniGraffle from the OmniGroup, which is SitePen’s swiss-army knife, the go-to application that we use for most of our initial wireframing and interaction design.
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Tags: baslamiq, design, interaction design, mockups, ui
Posted in UI Design | 5 Comments
September 4th, 2008 – by ddimmick
For UI professionals, the process of visually prototyping an application is a cornerstone in the design process. The challenge has always been to find a tool that will allow us to quickly develop visually detailed, and hopefully somewhat interactive, wireframes and mockups.
Outside of a few incredibly expensive applications, however, there are only a few really versatile options available to UI professionals. The ideal solution would be an application that allows UI pros to quickly wireframe interfaces, then populate the wireframes with high quality graphical elements to create a near-pixel-perfect mockup, share a graphical library with colleagues which can be independently updated and which could automatically propagate changes to dependent mockups, and finally allow for some interactive elements that could demonstrate actual interaction scenarios and allow developers to “experience” the interactions we are designing. Of course, the ability to easily translate a mockup directly into some workable, skeletal code would also be delicious.
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Tags: design, interaction design, ui
Posted in UI Design | 5 Comments
