December 23, 2009
Posted in Information Architecture, Prototyping, Wireframing — no comments.
Yesterday, Axure released the alpha version of Axure RP 5.6 for Mac, and this is great news. As one of my favorites characters would say “Hell, it’s about time!”. And as a gift, Axure released a downloadable version for test, free until February 28, 2010. Hey, this is a good news and awesome Christmas present.
I’ve been using Axure for more than 2 years and I’ve to say, it helped me to create products beyond clients expectations. It’s a powerful tool to create wireframes, real prototypes and specification documents – with notes and screenshots. If you’re looking for a good and easy-to-use tool, this is what you need.
Axure RP is the leading tool for rapidly creating wireframes, prototypes and specifications for applications and web sites. — Axure web site.
With its gorgeous looking icon and beautiful splash screen, Axure is easy as the Windows version. By default you have the following windows:
- Sitemap with all pages of your project
- Widgets the elements to drag-and-drop
- Masters most used elements (you can use the include concept from PHP)
- Annotations where you can take notes like Description, Status, Benefit, or create your own custom titles
- Interactions give live to elements
- Dynamic Panel Manager the “AJAX” panels for interactions without reload the page
- Page Notes for each page
- Page Interactions onload events
In the toolbar, the most used features grouped:
- Selection Mode
- Partial selection
- Full selection
- Connectors
- Generate
- Prototype
- Specifications
- Generators
- Object
- Group
- Ungroup
- Front
- Back
- Align modes
- Distribute modes
- Arrange panels
- Show/Hide left
- Show/Hide right
- Show/Hide all
The best part is the compatibility with Axure files made on Windows version. You can normally open files, edit them, save and open again on Windows. It works like a charm!
But remember, this is the alpha version. The Axure team have lot of work to do until the final release. Enjoy this incredible software on your Mac now!
Thanks Axure, for this lovely Christmas gift!
December 21, 2009
Posted in Information Architecture, Prototyping — no comments.
Protokit is toolkit created by Michael Angeles, aka jibbajabba, from Konigi to rapidly create HTML protoypes using jQuery, Blueprint, and iXEdit. If you are looking to create HTML prototypes and need a easy-to-use, friendly and fast framework, you probably will love Protokit.
HTML prototypes are very useful if coded in the right way. It is also very fast to do and easy to integrate any kind of interaction you need to show your client. Besides that, they’re easy to maintain and make change requests, anyone with some HTML and CSS knowledge can handle it.
If you’re new to prototyping, I really recommend the “Prototyping – A Practitioner’s Guide” book by Todd Zaki Warfel. And don’t miss my review of it.
What Protokit does for you
It’s very common clients request navigable prototypes of entire application or the most part of it. If you create wireframes with OmniGraffle or Photoshop for example, it’s not possible to represent real-time animations or interactions like scrollers, sliders, tooltips, etc. Protokit rapidly help you create these actions saving time and effort.
The good thing creating HTML prototypes is the chance to reuse the code. You and your team can work together and save even more effort reusing the prototype code. And not only HTML, the most reusable code is Javascript (if using the same framework it’s even better).
Why should I use Protokit
Because it’s beautiful and you’ll love it. Your clients will love it. The final result and the product delivered will be much more appreciated and satisfactory. Protokit outputs a beautiful layout with black, white and gray colors, with a lovely menu bar and notes bar at the right hand side and the specification document at the bottom.
Yes, it’s possible and easy to add notes and specs to your prototype. Notes are placed into a file with the extension .notes and Specs are placed into a file with extension .specs. That’s it, you’re done with notes and specs. And the best part of it, both of them are made in only HTML code. Simple and fast!
Go ahead and try it.
December 09, 2009
Posted in Information Architecture — no comments.
Today most of the Internet users have at least two e-mails, one social network account and a RSS reader, and sometimes even more. This is a typically profile of an user with too much information and no time to keep up with all of them. So, what can be done do save time and effort, and follow your favorite author or blog? Categorization, filters, and schedule. Three concepts to help you not to go crazy with this amount of information.
There are several online applications and desktop softwares to assist you organizing your data like password, blog feeds, tweets, Facebook, and many other things that you have online. I’ll show here apps that I’ve used and recommend, but feel free to give your opinion about others.
Passwords, notes, identities…
It’s not a easy job to remember all your passwords and accounts, and if you’re careful as I’m, you should use one different password for each account. To solve this issue, I use and recommend 1Password from Agile Solutions. An amazing Mac application and iPhone app for fast automatic form filling and a secure way to save all your passwords, notes, identities and even personal information like passport, ID and driver’s license.
If you like to save notes, Evernote does the job quite well. There are several features for quickly save notes and sync them over your computer and mobile.
Tweets, Facebook updates and RSS in one place
Save time with applications like Socialite to have all your information in one place. Socialite is a powerful tool to gather all information, news, updates, feeds in a beautiful and easy to use application.
“From news on Digg, photos on Flickr, statuses and photos on Facebook and Twitter updates, to full Google Reader RSS syncing, Socialite keeps all your social networks in one convenient place.” – Socialite page
Don’t waste time with several applications, each one with just one feature, grab apps like Socialite and keep up with your updates in one single place.
Categorization, filters, and schedule
Don’t kill yourself opening dozens of links on Twitter, reading hundreds of articles, answering thousands of e-mails at the same time, prioritize your day with scheduled moments to do one thing at time.
Filter your feeds with only the necessary, don’t try to read 300 blogs of technology, choose 10 to 30 of your interest and put them in folders of daily reading. The others put in folders to read later – make your day worth reading important news. And don’t try to read them all at the same time.
Create categories so you can chose what to read and focus your attention in one subject. If you starting reading all kind of information at the same time, you’ll probably forget what did you read at the first time.
Things like that help you to keep up with your information daily. You’ll probably save time and effort when prioritizing what you have to do and scheduling when you have to do. Keep in mind to always give yourself 10 to 15 minutes of rest at each hour.
November 05, 2009
Posted in Information Architecture, User Interface — one comment.
I just received the invite to try the new orkut interface, and decided to write something about it since my blog’s focus is Information Architecture.
At first view, I didn’t felt a big change. The colors are the same, the structure changed a little bit, and everything is where it was before. That is something I like and dislike. Some of the changes and user interactions in the new orkut are very similar to Facebook, like invite friends to an application or even send them invites to try the new orkut.
Check out the major differences between the new orkut and the old one.
The user interface changes
The first thing I noticed is that orkut added the Google bar at the top, with the links to “Web”, “Maps”, “News”, “Groups” and more. This is nice, now I feel that I’m using a Google service. And also there is a new, easy, and fast way to access my orkut Settings. The old interface simply added it way down in the left column, very hard to find.
I loved the way they fixed orkut’s bar, now I can quickly find my Scraps, Photos and Videos with just a mouseover on the logo. And finally I have freedom with a bigger search input and it is also possible to search within orkut and the web – using the Google Search service of course.
It’s possible to change colors, tell what I’m up to, see suggested friends by orkut, check what’s new within my profile and follow my friend updates. Nothing new so far.
User interactions and Information Architecture
The first feature I used was “Friend suggestions by orkut”, it’s a cool way to find friends within your network without searching for them all the time. And here is the first big issue: I sent a request to friend and nothing happened. Weird. After some clicks I realized that the friend I was trying to add had reached his friends limit, but where is the error message?
OMG, something is really wrong here. I lose a few seconds trying to find the error message, and it was all the time at the top, and not next to the add friend action so I can quickly know what is going on. Weird…
Now my friend requests and testimonials are hidden in the “What’s new” section, with some ambiguous actions. To check a sent testimonial I can click on “{friend’s name} wrote you a testimonial” or in the word “view”, they do the same thing, opens the testimonial. Do I really need two ways to see the testimonial? I don’t think so.
So that’s the quick look into the new orkut interface. Please let me know what do you think about the changes.
