Simulation Tools (Visio Replacements)

Article Idea:

suggested by Scott McDowell on 2006/02/08

It’s interesting to see that there are a host of applications out there such as iRise, Serena PVC, Simunication and others that have yet to be discovered by the IA/UX community. This is in part due to the marketing spin that these companies are playing. They are currently advertising their tools to the BA community which is about 3 times the size of the IA/UX community, however they are only reaching about 30% of that community, this is directly related to the fact that many BA’s are not visual communicators, they communicate via textual requirements. Check out my blog (source link above) and if you are intersted I would be glad to write an article or two pertaining to this market and how IA/UX professionals can vastly improve their efficiency by using simulation tools over traditional static applications like Visio, OmniGraffle, etc.

Want to see this idea turned into a story?

5 people said yes. | 0 people said no.

Jason Moccia

1 Reputation points

Posted 2006/02/09 @ 10:38AM with

I’m definitely interested in learning more about this. From what I’ve seen in recent months, simulation is starting to take off. I know of multiple large organizations that are actively using simulation to build out projects. The dynamic functionality you get with simulation tools definitely outshines static Visio wireframes.

Elisa Miller

129 Reputation points

Posted 2006/02/11 @ 18:56PM with

We’ve been looking at iRise as well as ProcessViews Composer. Our local UPA chapted held a demo of ProcessViews… and the iRise will conduct a demo in May.

Patrick Stapleton

6 Reputation points

Posted 2006/02/15 @ 06:21AM with

We too have been looking at these tools, both PVC and iRise are very interesting and I think likely to considerably change the elaboration landscape for both product development and serices delivery over the next year or so.

Donna Maurer

165 Reputation points

Posted 2006/02/16 @ 04:11AM with

I think this would be valuable as long as it is not a sales pitch (sorry, but I can’t tell what your affiliation is).

Scott McDowell

43 Reputation points

Posted 2006/02/18 @ 10:00AM with

I think the key is to address how simulation tools have changed the way application definition occurs as long as we keep the articles absent of specific vendors for now and focus purely on case studies then we could provide value to the readers.

Here’s a quick example to start things off, my business partner recently used a simulation tool to define both the business and user requirements for a small yet full featured site. The site consisted of about 25 pages, he shipped the simulation over to India for production; the resulting site came back verbatim to the simulation. We have been using this firm on and off for over two years now and this is the first time the results came back the way we defined them. The only difference was instead of providing traditional deliverables such as Word, Visio, etc. he provided a simulation. It has taken some convincing to change their methodology but now that they have seen the gains in time and the reduction in ambiguity I’m sure they will be much more open on future projects to accept our simulations.