On Feb 15, 2008 12:47 PM, Dave Cronin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > (I don't know what everyone is using for rendering, but I have to put a > plug in for Fireworks. I feel like the reason some designers resort to > interactive prototypes is that their tools don't handle state very well. > Between Frames and Pages, Fireworks helps do this quickly and fluidly.) > >
Dave, I find that for me static states in a form & behavior document storied out clearly communicate the action. For others this may not be the case. In our meetings with development things are clarified inevitably, and we get a lot of "OH...I see." Sometimes I bring up fireworks and click between states to show them. Perhaps this is the point of meetings. However, sometimes I do imagine that the things we are clarifying (behavior between 2 states) could have been handled by the documentation, that these things are to me *so obvious and should be made more so in some way.* I'd rather meetings be used to: a) Emotionally engage. Rally the troops so to speak around the problem at hand. Having dev in a meeting room and showing them evidence of the problems and customer footage. Not all of our documentation, whether using personas or not, is so real. The heart is tied to what it sees, and once dev has witnessed some of the background research and the f&b is tied to it they are "bought in." We have stories of dev going home on the weekend and spending 20hrs of their own time working through the technical architecture after these meetings. b) Clarify edge cases and* *technical architecture issues. So what might help? *Animation.* Even having the mouse drag across the screen between state 1 & 2 (pre/post click) embues a feeling of liveness. The other thing is that in an animation the visual stream is fixed so comparison between 2 states (e.g. pre/post click) is simple. Sometimes documentation techniques such as callouts and zoom-ins work, but I know that animation would work better a lot of the time. In a lot of animations I would embed callouts and overlays. What would help me...I have the fixed states as pages/frames, what I lack are the transitions. Take the mouse pointer bitmap from one position to another position. Is there a simple means to do this within fireworks? (without making a gazillion frames) Or do we have to transition to Flash? Flash sucks because it involves manual labor of importing each frame, and then if you edit your masters you have to redo everything. Navid ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
