Dan Kalafus — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:25 GMT

I’ve always been a fan of paper-and-pencil to-do lists… but once about half of the items are crossed off, it becomes harder to pick out the remaining items. Liz Danzico’s open-box lists are a great solution – it’s easy to scan the list for open boxes, even when most of the items are checked. Thanks Liz!

Dan Kalafus — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:56:15 GMT

Thanks Anders for starting this discussion! I’m jumping in a bit late, I know, but this raises some excellent points. I’ve just started using Axure, and I’m definitely sold on the idea of communicating to the tech and business teams through prototypes. It seems to me, though, that this approach is subject to similar constraints as other tools: You can only prototype what you already know how to code.

If I want to specify (say) inline editing of a particular item, or a modal overlay, or expanding form area, or any of those other nifty AJAX-y widgets, I’d need to either figure out how to code it, or get a developer to help me out—neither of which is very likely or time-effective. In these cases, drawing a quick storyboard on paper or Visio would be faster… but then the prototype no longer serves as full documentation…

(This also has the effect of discouraging us from designing novel interactions/widgets… though that might be a good thing in many cases.)

In practical terms, a library of components and snippets (as Michael Havard describes above) would be great here, and would allow the use of a WYSIWYG tool like Dreamweaver. I don’t have the resources to generate such a thing, though, and I suspect I’m not alone there. Anyone know if something like this is available?

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Dan Kalafus