Nanotim Nanotim — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 23:03:10 GMT

I first used “annotated” screenshots when I was responsible for Support Documentation. Quickly, I realized that the client really needed this type of information in the beginning of a project…not just the end. So, I stopped writing such verbose functional requirements up front, and started doing more wireframe, maintaining the annotations.

In the last couple of years, I’ve started building wireframes in Flash – with the annotations and prompts to guide the user. While its a bit more work than doing it in PPT or Visio, it begins to portray more accurately the tasks and flows in the application.

The next step for us is to make our prototypes more durable – prototyping in HTML/JavaScript, and iterating right there in the presentation code. We’re going to need to build a toolkit to make it easy to get going quickly – but, I’ve seen some good examples, linked from articles like this one: http://particletree.com/features/ajax-wireframing-approac…

My mission is to give clients a more realistic view of the application earlier in the project (in order to iterate earlier and have a more valuable list of features) while economizing the efforts spent developing IA and controls…to create a more usable/accurate/mature handoff for engineering.

Thanks for showing us how you do your wireframes…looks pretty familiar. Good to know there are lots of folks doing valuable work.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Nanotim Nanotim