Boxes and Arrows: Comments by stewart dean

stewart dean — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:29 GMT

I recently have had to work on a ‘test’ project – one where I was filling all roles with some help. Usualy I work with a fairly big team and the CMS is already in place growling at me (usualy two versions out of date and with a big list of ‘we can’t do that’s.

What I found is all open source PHP based content management systems simply are not open (they have a particular way of working), and are very much driven by adding functionality, not getting a simple working application. This, in my experience is also true for commercial products and, as yet, I have yet to meet a CMS I would say even knew what an information architect was.

In the end I dropped my Microsoft prejudice after being recommended a tool called Umbraco (www.umbraco.net). This by no means have all the features of, say Drupal, but that’s what makes it work better. It works in a similair way to Serena Collage (http://www.serena.com/) but is less confused and doesnt have any work flow (that I can see).

To get the most out of the program requires some knowllege .net or XSLT (my personal preference) but in terms of creating a site, creating news stories, letting you end users update things and in general deliver what you had in mind rather than what the CMS wants you do to it works well.

The ultimate CMS doesnt appear to exist, in fact there’s nothing close out there in my view, but Umbraco did allow me to build the site how I wanted it to be and all the ‘can’t do that’ problems where about adding a few more lines of code into the XSLT templates. Yes it has it’s problems but it’s worth a play.

stewart dean — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:31 GMT

PS? – oh you mean PublicSquare. Decode your language – you’ve been near too many programmers! Personally I’m not after a specialist tool, one designed to a particular type of site as, in my experience, that is completely arbitrary. One man work flow control interface is another persons needless bloat. For some Web 2.0 is about users to some it’s about confusing users (I mean who apart from the techincal ‘haves’ actualy get what a RSS feed is? How many actualy use them?) I’m very cynical about yet another new CMS but am interested to see what you guys are coming up with.

stewart dean — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 10:43:56 GMT

It good to see this issue raised as it helps us to define what wireframes are useful for and what they are not useful for. The list from Fran Diamond is a good summary of what wireframes, is in the standard grey box approach, could be used for. To add my view I would strongly advise against using wireframes for usability testing as this is what a prototype (be it paper, lo fi or hi fi) is used for. You can turn wireframes in to prototypes but I think they should be seen as different things.

Wireframes define the functional spec of a given project. I use them for internal project communication. In terms of client commuication wireframes often don’t work unless accompanied by visual design and extra explaination material. So for client sign off richer visual design is very useful – but then that’s what the visual design should do. I find that clients if they can see a wireframe and the visual design side by side for three pages can effecively visualise the other wireframes.

There are times when I have done more colourful wireframes, this has been on one or two of my own projects where the team is much smaller and I am making the design decisions.

As with all deliverables they need to change according to context of the project but you example appears to fill the place of a prototype.

Stewart Dean