Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Patrick Stapleton

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:33 GMT

We too have been looking at these tools, both PVC and iRise are very interesting and I think likely to considerably change the elaboration landscape for both product development and serices delivery over the next year or so.

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:35 GMT

I am currently working through issues with one of these tools Serena Composer in a blog and would very much welcome comments and additions.

http://serenacomposer.blogspot.com

In relation to your query Donna I think currently there is little support for IA’s in all the products that I looked at as part of my white paper (Irise, Serena Composer, Azure RP, Sofia and Enterprise Simulator). But surely this is opportunity :)

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:36 GMT

I’m a major believer myself in visual processes and will often promote DVD as the media platform of choice over paper. However video streams encoded for the web are to date pretty nasty and the effect level over text and images is considerable.

I guess we will endup starting with slides and audio – I remember seeing a presentation by Apple years back that did this with style.

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:36 GMT

I really enjoyed the opening explination of PIAs and RIAs – very useful stuff. I am also a great believer in wireframes and for that matter any kind of visually orientated process. However coming from years of in the trenches services time I think I would think twice at even suggesting this process due to the work load increase it would demand.

Really I believe the future of elaboration is in specifically designed specification and simulation tools rather than technical drawing tools such as Viso, Illustrator and the like. These new tools hold the promise of natively supporting good design patterns and automations to reduce workload.

The big issue really is – what are good design patterns for RIAs? An article on this i’m sure would garner great interest :)

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:36 GMT

Innovation is a topic very close to my heart and I must admit I had not considered that a fit company is more likely to gain from it than an unhealthy one. But now that I think about it of course your right and in fact I would go further to say that in many cases unhealthy companies are also less willing to accept innovation than their healthy cousins.

Personally I’ve been frustrated with the ability to innovate within many of the organizations I’ve worked for in the past. Rarely do you see processes in place to promote innovation or even enable the gathering of ideas from existing staff. Why should innovation be province only of management or highly paid external consultants? Surely staff with rich knowledge of their organizations business have something to offer as well?

Sometimes I think if I were a investment analyst I would weigh the long term value of a technology company heavily on the robustness and maturity of its innovation processes. Where none are in place or even worse considered unnecessary, my reading on that companies long term worth would be very likely negative.

Innovation is critical for technology companies and as such harvesting it should be high priority.

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:37 GMT

I am not a huge believer in icons, at least in the web application arena which is where most of my software design experience lies. To my mind they tend to add download weight without any major value add. However I been interested for a long time in the idea of building English weighted but language agnostic applications that would use icongraphy to point non-english reading users towards most common use cases.

As such my interest in such an analysis would lie with understanding what functional imagery could be considered universal. If indeed there was any.

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:37 GMT

Yes a ripper article, I have just finished a couple of these types of papers and I wish had read this beforehand. Dying to get my hands on that sample so I can build a strawman from it.

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:37 GMT

To my mind this is an interesting idea and would very much like to see the results – nice one.

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:36 GMT

From my exploration of this area, I would agree Axzure has the best bang for the buck. However my perception is that Composer has the most potential to be a comprehensive simulation through documentation system.

But then AJAX throws a big stick in the works and currently I’m leaning toward Microsoft’s Expression Interactive Designer which from what I’ve seen to date is the most interesting RIA development tool out there. In fact even the Expression Graphic Designer tool is an eye opener – effectively replacing both Illustrator and Photoshop in the one tool (with decent web integration) and currently for free!

Adobe the guys who you would have expected to lead in the simulation space (but have yet to step in) are likely to miss the boat – again :)

Patrick Stapleton — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 04:26:35 GMT

What stands out for me as useful in this article is your screen overlay. “Section Connector”, “Page Connector”, “Control Bar”, “Convenience Functionality” etc – these are really useful terms that I’m going to use going forward. Did you invent these or are they from something that I should read ? :)

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 06:39:15 GMT

I’m interested to know how you model menu items in this diagraming approach. In many cases the name of the menu item is not the same as the page itself as such it is often useful to include them in the site diagram.

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 06:48:44 GMT

In my experience good wireframes are an excellent way to define the scope of a build. The alternative of writing code to specify the scope can be problamatic.

Invariably the design process means change – quick iterations which normally if you are using the code approach results in hacked code. By the time this code gets to the point where the visual result gets signoff it is normally not optimal. However invariably this code is pushed into use for the final development by management who are reluctant to pay for it to be rewritten to be optimal.

As such by taking the wireframe approach and remaining non code you can work faster and in the end get a better code result because it gets written just once after the design has been completed in the optimal manner based on (what is hoped) a buildable design.

Patrick Stapleton — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:03:05 GMT

Juanne, it seems you would be a great asset to the following group
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ui-pattern-authors/

This group is working toward developing a UI Pattern language standard and I personally am pushing for a consolidated library which it sounds like you may a solution for based on this article description.

Patrick Stapleton — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 08:44:30 GMT

Can I just say what a refreshing change it is to smell the dirty laundry. In my experience most of us are busy a lot of time slapping backs and generally confirming how good things are going (even when they are ever so not). It seems in a lot of corporate cultures today it is OK to deride the competition but very “non team player” to criticize internally.

In the past I was a consultant and found that invariably the earlier I went after “the smoke” the sooner the job got done and I was on a plane back home. As such while some folks (team members, partners and customer alike) would avoid conflict by tiptoeing around problems, I was always keen to push them into the open early. It seemed logical to fix things early, get the job done right the first time and so I could get back home on time.

I say bring on the disasters! Publish under a pseudonym if necessary learning from others mistakes is ever so much more less painful – and entertaining to boot :)

Patrick Stapleton — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 11:11:24 GMT

More recently I have regarded Acrobat a bit like a virus. It is so bloated, and forever asking for this update and that – i’ve given up and moved over to Foxit PDF reader. However I noticed a lot of the tricks in your PDF’s don’t function in this reader :(