Saturday, 22 September 2007

interaction design tools

Last Wednesday, I left the kids with my darling husband and enjoyed a fun evening at the UX Cocktail Hour in Amsterdam. This week's session, kindly hosted by Satama, was about interaction design tools. Martijn van Welie (of interaction design pattern fame) gave us a quick tour of the building and a glimpse at Satama's projects & design process. (I was quite intrigued, actually; certainly an interesting group to keep in mind if/when I'm in the market for full-time employment again :-)

Bernard Boekhold and Sytse Govert were sharing their experience using Axure to design wireframes, flows, and prototypes. It looked quite neat, and fairly easy to learn. I particularly liked the ability to automatically produce interactive prototypes and customizable documentation from wireframe specs. However, I fear that it might be too restrictive and limited for creative designs.

In comparison, Martijn pointed out his collection of Visio macros, as well as Jacco's work on swipr, a toolset to create integrated interactive design deliverables from standard Visio files. So far, I've mostly been using Visio stencils of Jesse James Garrett's Visual Vocabulary.

At EuroIA 2007, Alexander Jongman will be presenting his research on UiaML (Universal information architecture Modeling Language). I'm hoping to attend a guest lecture at Hogeschool Utrecht next week and find out more about his work.

Somebody mentioned, that the folks at Cap Gemini's UX group are using a great wireframe tool, too, but it sounded far to expensive for a freelance designer like myself. (Still it'd be neat if I could wriggle an invitation for a demo out of my contacts at Cap Gemini - hint, hint)

Other handy links include:
Guess I should really continue this list of links on our site.

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