Wen Johnson — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 23:59:21 GMT

Good article, but yeah, it does miss some wireframing apps for us Mac designers. I’ve been using oversite for awhile (http://taubler.com/oversite). It’s cheap, and it will do wireframes, site maps, simulations, and annotations. Like the article mentions about Composer, you still need to have a licensed copy to open a file, but you can also export your stuff to HTML when you need to share with others.

Wen Johnson — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:29:08 GMT

The use of online financial applications as examples in this article could make for another interesting conversation, related to the amount of “hand-holding” that the user would expect or require. My first impression with the examples provided was that some of them were a little overkill in terms on the amount of textual information provided to the user. Particularly, the first Wells Fargo example in the “Overview Page” section of the article stank of “roadblock” to me. But then I remembered back to my days of working at a dot-com financial start-up. The usability lessons we learned there were basically that it wasn’t possible to provide “too much” information to the user. Applying for a loan online (or in person, for that matter) is a scary prospect, and so users required instructions and assurances every step of the way.

At the other extreme would be something simple like signing up as a user to post a message on a site—not like I’ve done that lately! ;) Having such an “Overview Page” in the middle of that process would obviously be a roadblock, and would turn many people away.

So my point is simply that—while many attributes of good form design span any scenario—some of them would vary a lot based on the end goal of the form.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Wen Johnson