Bekki Matthews — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 05:55:48 GMT

One of my developers just recommended I try Sketch Flow which is included with Expression Blend 3 from Microsoft. Not only does it come packaged with sketchy elements, but you can also map out your pages to be interactive as well as embed Silverlight animations to demonstrate more complex (but still sketchy) behaviors. I’ve just started playing around with it, but so far I’m pretty hooked. It gives me the opportunity to not only mock up the screens themselves, but also to allow my business users and developers to start to imagine how our users will actually use the functionality.

It’s other cool feature is that you can publish the sketchy prototype and users can not only view it remotely through their browsers (in a Silverlight application), but they can also add comments and highlight/mark up the screens, then send you those annotations to incorporate (or ignore) to refine the prototype.

I’ve been a diehard Visio user for several years now and don’t see this as completely replacing Visio as one of the tools I use for mocking up a new screen or site, but it’s definitely looking like it will be a great addition.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Bekki Matthews