michael havard — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:11:50 GMT

In my current job I’ve seen everything; Powerpoint, Word, Visio, iRise, Axure, Napkins, whiteboard, whiteboard applications, Denim, Rails, Silverstream, Access variety of levels of suck involved. Plus it depends on whose using the tool. What we landed on was XML/XSL/JS/CSS. We put together a lightweight framework of components and snippets that could be used within dreamweaver, eclipse, or any xml/xsl editor. It provides simple interaction modeling enough to show the flow of an application. We then annotate some of the more complex interactions to develop later and stay focused on core needs (which would not be the fancy spinning-clicky-wheely thing that takes so long to develop). Each layer is independent so once you’ve prototyped for awhile you have pieces you can hand off to people downstream. Since it’s all XML you can run XSL to produce various levels of documentation for each recipient. It takes some technical knowledge to get it started, but very little time for new people with little technical knowledge to pick it up and run. Nowadays you don’t have to have a server to run this off of most browsers will transform XML/XSL just fine, plus there’s a large library of pre-existing templates available for functionality that you would normally need to write java or javascript to get (date parsing, data formatting, sorting, grouping, etc.)

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by michael havard