[IxDA Discuss] Pros and Cons of Wireframing tools

[Bill Bulman]

Jeff,

If you are a designer, I figure you probably have some familiarity  
with Illustrator. We use a combination of Illustrator and Indesign  
for our wireframing, which works quite well in my opinion.   
Illustrator allows us to create pixel perfect wireframes that are  
elegant and beautiful, while being easy to update(which is incredibly  
important). We incorporate those wireframes into an Indesign document  
that allows us to add behavior notes to the wireframes.  It works  
quite well for us, and even those on the team that are less design  
focused picked up Illustrator and Indesign in a matter of hours.  But  
like Dan said, one size definitely does not fit all!

My biz partner Todd Warfel wrote an article on UXMatters about our  
process, that may explain our process further:  http:// 
www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000161.php

WIth that said, I think you need to look at who the wireframe's  
audience is.  This is important as this will help you decide on how  
refined the wireframes need to be, which will help you narrow down  
your tool decision. As a consulting firm, our wireframes are used by  
the client team, typically product management, as we as a development  
team, and design team, so we have to meet the various needs of all  
these audiences. So we need elements like extremely detailed behavior  
notes, pattern library elements, etc.  In some cases in the past,  
when I was in the corporate world,  I have only needed to create  
screens to be passed to a designer, who didn't need detailed behavior  
specifications, so I used visio, omnigraffle, or fireworks, whichever  
was easiest and quickest for the task.  So I think you need to look  
at the end needs to decide which tool to use.

You also mentioned wireframing large projects, which is something we  
do quite often. It can be tedious and confusing working on extremely  
large wireframing efforts. I recommend adopting some sort of version  
control, as well as using a pattern library as these will speed up  
your wireframe maintenance efforts considerably.


Bill Bulman
Partner
Messagefirst, Inc.
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Making information usable.
Beautifully.




On Feb 8, 2007, at 9:50 AM, Kiesel, Jeffrey (User Experience) wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> My team is evaluating wireframing tools, and I would love to get some
> feedback from this list.  Things tend to be leaning towards Visio  
> at the
> moment.  Being a designer, I'm not too thrilled at the idea of using
> Visio.  I don't have a lot of experience in wireframing large  
> projects,
> but it seem to me that Photoshop might be better.
>
> What types of wireframing tools have you used on your projects, and  
> what
> were the pros and cons of using them?
>
> Thanks,
> ~jeff
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