Comments on Visio Replacement? You Be the Judge

carlos duarte — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:37 GMT

hmm.. well.. how come tiddlywiki wasn’t mentioned here?

Bryan MacLean — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:39:59 GMT

I’m with Simunication and have talked with many different companies regarding simulation & prototyping. I am a developer/analyst by trade and I’d like to share some observations …with my Simunication hat off :-)

Firstly, I agree with Scott that there is no doubt that simulation/prototyping tools are real, effective and here to stay. It’s a reflection of the maturing process of the ~20 year old enterprise/web software industry. It took a century for airplane, auto and manufacturing sectors to mature processes like simulation.

I think what will be interesting to see is how the role of simulation will evolve in app development. In regards to this forum, the BA role was created to fill a communication gap between computer programmers and the business users yet we still have an endemic requirements problem. This is not a reflection on the BA’s competence, as many other factors come into play as we know. Now viewed from another level, the BA is now being asked to perform the role of computer programmers to build simulations, now “possible” with the support of these new tools. Will that work better? Maybe?

Now throw in new methodologies like Agile with developers typically programming a prototype with the intention to evolve and refactor it into the end application. This prototype is developed in short increments and reviewed constantly with the stakeholder to address inevitable changing requirements. Will that work better? Maybe?

I think the combination of these two approaches suggest the following to increase the project success rate:
1.) an interative process with customer involvement is necessary
2.) a prototype or simulation be developed in the elaboration phase, nothing beats this to flush out user requirements
3.) the simulation tool must support that a user could be any of the following, BA,UX, IA, Architect, developer, etc. with the nature and risk level of the project dictating the skills required to build a simulation that ultimately will put the customer at ease at signoff
4.) the simulation can’t be thrown away and minimally must export real assets for development, in the future maybe even evolvable into the final application

If I was starting a software project, there is no question I would simulate or prototype first. My tool considerations if I was new to simulation would be both short and long term. In the short term, I’d try several tools on several projects, and insist with vendors on a free trial of a month or two. There is a relatively low learning curve to most tools and little risk of jeopardizing a project. After trying a project or two then you can see what features work for your own particular environment.

Long term I suspect the following feature questions will weigh heavily on product choice: Do you need true interactive data driven simulations or dynamic screen flows? Will you mainly be creating high or low fidelity? Do you need reusability so you don’t have to start from scratch every time? Do you need exportable assets like HTML/JS/CSS? Do you need web based distribution? Do you need requirements export to tools from Borland/IBM/Telelogic etc? Do you need incubation that gives the customer the ultimate simulation experience?

(Simunication hat on) Let me just update the information provided regarding Simunication. Our product was renamed to Simunicator about six months ago with a new AJAX version made available a couple of weeks ago with new features and improved usability.

It’s an early market and all products are evolving very quickly. The users will dictate the product features through forums like this and thoughtful insight is always appreciated.

Jacco Nieuwland — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:39:59 GMT

Great article, I really wish I had more time to check out some of these tools for myself. I’ve been dealing with prototypes a lot more over the last year as well, and have found that certain ideas and solutions are much better communicated though an interactive demonstration than through the paper wireframes.

One other solution that wasn’t covered in the article is a sort of halfway solution between static wireframes and fully interactive prototypes. I’ve created swirp to do just that. You create your sitemaps/screenflows wireframes in the standard way using visio, but you then you press the magic button and out comes an interactive HTML prototype. Definitely not HiFi, it can only be used to show navigation concepts (no text input etc.). But it does provide all the benefits that Visio gives you (perfect prints, annotations, multiple documents so more than one designer can work on it, etc). Check it out at swipr.com (free & open source!).

In the end it probably all boils down to the right tool for the right job. And time and money restrictions are always a problem, of course.

Jonathan Baker-Bates — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:37 GMT

This is a very useful article. The only thing I’d say about it though is that it, in common with many other discussions of these tools, concentrates primarily on their value for prototyping software. I have been following Axure’s development closely, but not because of the product’s prototyping abilities. After all, I can prototype in just about anything – somebody here mentioned Hypercard, then there’s Dreamweaver, Flash, Powerpoint, etc. etc.

All this is, in my opinion, just noise. The real prize that tools like Axure hold out the possibility of attaining is that of being an “IDE for Experience Design.” Such a tool that lets us as IA/UX professionals communicate programatically with developers and designers via XML. It would seem to me to be a relatively small step from producing modularised screen designs as Word documents to XML schemas “describing” our designs that could then be used by other tools or systems to interpret those designs.

My worry is that Microsoft is stealing a potentially very powerful march in this area with Expression and XAML, but in being distracted by prototyping, the IA community is not stimulating non-MSFT vendors in the right direction.

Pauric Pauric — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:36 GMT

I would just like to give a nod to Omnigraffle. While its not on par with the likes of Axure, its a very nice combination of vector drawing, stencils functionality and layers. Sort of visio meets illustrator, without all the visio nuances.

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/

Excellent for flow defs, worth a look for wireframes on a budget. No interaction capabilites.

Michael Hughes — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:36 GMT

Good article, Scott. I too am in the Axure camp because what I really need is a wireframe/mid-fidelity prototyping tool. I think it is a good gateway tool to some of the more robust requirements management tools discussed in this article. I have found with Axure, that I must have external ways to link my designs back to requirements and to use case elaborations. Tools like i-rise seem pricey if compared to Visio and Axure, but it must be compared to fuller requirments management suites, such as Rationale.

laurie gray — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:36 GMT

Great article Scott!

As a former user of Axure and current user of iRise, I think the price point discussions are appropriate and highly necessary. As a solo practitioner in-house, where most everything I did was viewed as 100% overhead, Axure did what I needed it to do and it did it well. The price point at purchase was around $500. We also were not doing a lot of work with RIA’s.

Now that I’m back in the consulting world, I’m fortunate to have access to iRise. It’s much more robust than Axure. My view is that it is the enterprise level equivalent and Axure is more of the smaller shop version.

There are things I could do in Axure that I cannot do in iRise and vice versa. I would imagine that convergence of these tools or the features of these tools will be something to watch in the future.

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:36 GMT

From my exploration of this area, I would agree Axzure has the best bang for the buck. However my perception is that Composer has the most potential to be a comprehensive simulation through documentation system.

But then AJAX throws a big stick in the works and currently I’m leaning toward Microsoft’s Expression Interactive Designer which from what I’ve seen to date is the most interesting RIA development tool out there. In fact even the Expression Graphic Designer tool is an eye opener – effectively replacing both Illustrator and Photoshop in the one tool (with decent web integration) and currently for free!

Adobe the guys who you would have expected to lead in the simulation space (but have yet to step in) are likely to miss the boat – again :)

Jesper Rønn-Jensen — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:39:58 GMT

For the more technical people I can highly recommend to use Ruby on Rails as a rapid prototyping tool.

As Anders Ramsay points out, tools like iRise have a hard time in prototyping AJAX functionality. Here Ruby on Rails is the star. Because of the built-in possibilities to easy add autocomplete widgets, drag-n-drop interface and more.

I wrote about how we use it at work on my blog justaddwater.dk:

Justaddwater.dk: Ruby on Rails as a Rapid Prototyping Tool

Anders Ramsay — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:40:20 GMT

Very interesting article. While I think there certainly is something to be said for simulation tools, I have personal experience with several of these tools, including iRise, which I used for designing enterprise apps as an in-house IA at a multinational. First, re. the price, it does not have to be as high as 150K. Our package ran about 50K, which still is an astronomical sum (though not necessarily for a multinational or other large corp, which is a key demographic for iRise) – though packages can run up to 250k (which is what I was told Yahoo paid back in the day for an earlier version of the system.)

While iRise in many ways is very powerful, I ultimately found that it’s key value was in being able to rapidly communicate a new concept. In other words, it worked when part of the early stages of an IKIWISI (I Know It When I See It) requirements gathering model, in which a design was sort of grokked from a set of high-level business requirements, and then I just cranked out a functioning simulation in a day or two, to which stakeholders then responded. *However*, when the proof of concept phase was completed, and time came to actually get into detailed design, it turned out to be far more effective to just whiteboard stuff and return to doing wireframes (either visio or xhtml or flash or some other combination of tools) in collaboration with designers and developers. Why? Well, there are many reasons…

One huge reason was that we found prototyping the functionality in the actual target environment to ultimately be a far beneficial approach. In doing so, we were not only validating the user experience, but also validating the technology.

This is maybe an even bigger reason: at least from my experience, these simulators by and large are not capable of rapidly prototyping ajax functionality or other highly customized interaction design in which things refresh at the element level or animate or whatever, which for me, is an essential component of modern interaction design – for that reason, they may become a constraining factor, since one might only consider design options that the simulator supports.

Uri Kochavi — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:53:27 GMT

My experience is very similar to Fred’s, and I agree with what he said. We too sat in an iRise demo, and the quote we got was 50k to half a mil!!
For my money (well, not really mine..) Axure delivers so much more bang for the buck. Not that iRise is not impressive – and yes, I’d love the DB connectivity + logic and all, but I think Axure nailed the famous 80% of the use cases for 80% of the users, and for the right price. It is, however, primarily for web apps, and when I had to mock up a rich client recently I had to return to Visio ;-(
you can simulate some AJAX with it, too.

The best thing about Axure:
very easy to learn and use, I was productive since day 1
the worst thing:
it produces really big HTML files, so try to keep them short

Fred Beecher — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:51:32 GMT

Ji,

I’ve been using Axure for a relatively long while now and I can tell you that there is pretty much no interaction I can’t prototype in that tool outside of drag and drop. There is a lot of facility for making the pages highly interactive without page loads, and this has allowed me to get a good idea of how usable an interaction is before it’s been fully designed.

Scott, there are a few inaccuracies in your discussion of Axure’s features. First, it does include a facility for creating page flows (scenario design). Admittedly, it’s rudimentary, but it’s been good enough for my purposes. Second, it does allow for limited data interaction. Axure has one page variable that it can play with, and you can make user interactions set the value of this variable. You can then set interactive elements on the page to react to this variable.

Regarding Axure as a Visio replacement, it *has* replaced Visio for me, nearly. The only thing I continue to use Visio for is site maps. And that’s fine with me. : )

One more thing… I think it’s important to note the cost of iRise… while it is a really excellent tool, it costs around $150,000. I’m not kidding and that’s not a typo. My company was looking into that vs. Axure and we contacted a rep who gave us this figure. We are no longer looking at iRise. : )

David Malouf — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:36 GMT

Other tool offerings that do “prototyping” (Where in the world did the term “simulators” come from for UX designers?

Adobe Flash/Flex: You can create data sets in XML, and generate real elaborate interactions.

(upcoming)
Microsoft Expression: Interactive Designer: Just like Flash but for WPF/E.

These simulators for the most part—the ones mentioned above—differ from the tools I mention here in that they are also document management systems or have some connectivity to a document.

Giles Colborne — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:35 GMT

Man, I miss HyperCard.

ji kim — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:47:59 GMT

I think lot of the tools mention above are pretty good tools for simulating websites or webapplications with basic UI interation….but I think they still lack ability to effectively simulate rich internet or desktop applications…..I guess I’m still stuck prototyping with visio, photoshop, snagit, and powerpoint :)

Note: I’m always little skeptical about these tool vendors who claim to provide solutions to everything…..to me, a good prototyper should be able to use just about anything – long as they could do it fast and get their point across effectively to their audience. I still think paper/pen is still pretty good :)