Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Jeffrey Engel

Jeffrey Engel — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:21:06 GMT

Ross, you might want to look into iRise. I was assigned a project very late in the development phase and the BAs pretty much used iRise to create an “alpha” prototype. Look and feel was horrendous (BAs aren’t designers) and I never personally used it but from what I could tell the purpose of iRise is to aid analysts with their functional design specs and possibly IA/UX/UI people in generating look and feel but also mocking up and generating code for the application or website itself.

Jeffrey Engel — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:30:02 GMT

I really like Concept Draw myself, I have an account, but admittedly haven’t used it enough to know if it’s truly a Visio replacement.

There is one thing it’s definitely better in: it’s online and therefore ubiquitous.

Companies making products like ConceptShare “get it”. They understand that users need tools, not suites of bloated software. Visio isn’t bloated, but it doesn’t seem to automatically know what I need to do… it was clearly developed by programmers.

It’s kind of like if I’m building houses, I don’t want to be given tools to make hammers. I want the hammers and saws already made! Visio does some of this, but Concept Share does a better job I think. They know you want to show it to other people, all the tools are geared towards designing web-oriented stuff.

We need more products like this.

Jeffrey Engel — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:45:04 GMT

I love Fireworks. I know why Adobe gives it short schrift because it really is a Photoshop Killer in terms of web design and Adobe would rather sell you a $1000 app than a $350 app. People who haven’t used it don’t realize the power of this unassuming application. The whole Photoshop/Imageready “solution” is immature compared to it.

What’s so great about Fireworks is that except for some automation stuff, it blows away Visio in terms of building wireframes.

Then you can upgrade those wireframes and start designing your site in the same way you’d used Illustrator (multiple, moveable objects can be on a single layer… unlike Photoshop which puts everything in its own layer which is insane).

Then you can slice up the design, apply code to the slices, export everything to generic code or Dreamweaver-ready code or whatever you want.

Pull into Dreamweaver or GoLive and you’re 70% done.

I’ve been using Photoshop since 1990, and I use Visio every day, but I’ll take Fireworks if I had to choose a single application to get my work done.

Jeffrey Engel — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:48:59 GMT

Yeah I was thinking the same thing.. I remember this site being around a long time but the lack of activity in the forums had me thinking that maybe B&A isn’t as popular as I thought it was. That was until Christina posted the above.

Maybe as IAs and Usability people we are too worried about our subjects not being appropriate for this site?