Aaron Travis explores the motivation and payoff for developing low-fidelity wireframes for user interfaces during the design process. While a web-specific article, their rationale was clearly thought out and expressed in a way that makes it relevant to a wide variety of disciplines:
Read More for excerpts
Continue reading “Why Wiggly Wireframes?
d.tools is a combination hardware and software system that makes prototyping hardware interfaces fast and easy. With it, inexperienced test subjects were able to re-create an ipod interface in a half hour. The fact that subjects without training in electronics or software development can achieve so much with this tool is extraordinary. What stands out most about this system is that it is generalized (you can create any combination of inputs and interface elements) and specific (intended for use in designing electronic product interfaces.) Like many of the tools I’ve written about, d.tools’ insistence on not being everything to everybody, while maintaining a broad enough feature set to be a useful tool for rapid ideation is a strength. While interfaces developed using d.tools may not be tightly integrated into a development process, I can only imagine that when using it as a system for validating ideas and testing multiple solutions could solve many problems down the road in product development.
Some recent developments in the system are particularly exciting to me: I was exctied to see new support for Arduino, Phidgets and Wiring. The system was also on display at the 2006 Maker Faire in San Francisco, and a new hardware design (left) has been developed, which means that it lives on.
d.tools was developed at the Stanford HCI Group.
ComicLife enables users to create comic strips by simply dragging and dropping their own images onto comic templates, to which they can add captions, titles, speech and thought bubbles. The result is a crisp-looking comic-book layout.
ComicLife’s popularity has exploded, thanks to its ease-of use, integration with iPhoto and other usability features. The software is incredibly easy to use out-of-the-box, but has powerful features which allow a user to customize their creations endlessly. This software isn’t limited to creating family photo albums, it could easily be used to help in the creation of professional storyboards, user scenarios or quick one-off portfolio pages. ComicLife empowers you to quickly assemble a story on paper.
Check out this photostream, where a flickr user used ComicLife to create a media studies textbook/polemic reminiscent of the tract style of Scott McCloud or Quentin Fiore’s design for the work of Marshall McLuhan, or this page, where a World of Warcraft player narrates his mmorpg adventures.
