Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Floris Nijdam

Floris Nijdam — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 13:41:11 GMT

Thanks for the post. It’s good to know all of this is possible.

Personally I don’t really see the benefits. If I want a paper prototype I’ll use paper. If I need a high fidelity prototype I’ll ask our developers. For everything in between there’s tools like Axure (or Visio or Powerpoint etc..) that, in my opinion, are far more convenient in use.

However, as Weston said, it’s one more addition to the design toolkit. So thanks for posting all this, who knows it might come in handy one day.

Floris Nijdam — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:47:43 GMT

Excellent article.
At first it all seemed rather logical and not that new. However, after a while it really cleared my viewpoint on the matter.

I use Axure as a tool and noticed that the parts of the theory translates really well to the tool. I took the stacking hierarchy (figure 10) and translated the green bits directly into masters and the yellow bits into the site map structure.
(So I made Masters folders “_views” containing “_tile groups” containing “_Tiles” and split up/grouped some elements in order to correctly fit in the right folder. My sitemap actually fitted the other stacking levels already.)

Organizing and breaking down all my elements into these layers and thus becoming aware of their “true stacking identity” did not really change my design. However it did help me to get a grip on the vast amount of different elements in use. This will not only allow me to communicate more precisely with developers and designers, but also makes adjustments in Axure really easy. (For those that don’t know Axure: Masters link objects into other objects in your design. Change one and change them all. It is the ‘inheritance’ principle all the way)

I’m curious about part three and see if it will help easy my job like this article did :)

Floris Nijdam — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 04:03:13 GMT

Thanks for a great addition to the series Joe.

I’m trying to convert your theoretical approach to a -for me- more tangible example. Would it be fair to translate your top level stacking orders like this (for most situations):
- Portal Suite = Website (as in top navigation like “consumer, business
- Portal = Main category
- Section = Subcategory

One other thing I was wondering was: Why 7 levels?
Some websites have more structural levels than the ‘portal’ and ‘section’ level. Also, the tile building blocks could be split up in even smaller tiles (like the header, body and footer section) and even those could be split up etc… Is your definition based on being “workable” or is there another reason?

Keep up the good work. Waiting for #4 :)