Wireframe.cc - minimal wireframing tool - for free. Frame Box - Lightweight online tool for creating mockups. Why It’s Important to Sketch Before You Wireframe. Have you ever had an idea for a website or application? It’s easy to come up with the idea, but the hard part is understanding how that idea will take shape in user interface form. This is where sketching is useful. Sketching happens in many professions that involve creativity and construction. Even Leonardo Da Vinci had to sketch out his inventions before he started to build them. No matter how smart you are, It’s impossible to go from a simple idea in your head to immediately building it out without hashing out the details in between.
Sketching out your idea before you build it is necessary for every designer to do. Every Idea Needs User Interface Translation Designing the user interface is a process. Sketching takes your imaginative mind from the clouds to the user interface screen where you can start thinking about the user experience. A Sketch is Not a Wireframe Many designers mistakenly think a sketch is a wireframe.
Sketching Always Comes Before Wireframing The Power of Sketching. Interface Origami • Tack Blog. In a previous post, I mentioned a way of thinking about interactions and interface within a framework of depth and space. The ideas were centered around the digital space, but as a designer I find it’s important to remove myself from that space and explore solutions that can originate in physical space. One of the easiest ways to do this is to break out scissors and paper.
With paper you can remove the constraints of working in pixels to fold, tear, flip, curl and manipulate the medium to discover solutions that may have otherwise been missed. To illustrate this, I created a few examples based on some familiar apps and others based on former concepts I’ve played around with in the past. Clear & Path Clear has an interesting interaction where you pinch two list items apart to make room for an additional item. Accordion By folding paper like an accordion, you could see how you might collapse some list items to display content underneath. Fold & Peel. Connecting. Alltop - Top User Interface News. UX Blog – Usability | UX Booth - Part 2. When is Learnability More Important than Usability? Is it ok to ask your users to learn your interface? As UI design is maturing and the web is becoming a more advanced land of complex interfaces is it now unreasonable for every feature to be instantly usable? Touch devices have also entered the mainstream and added a multitude of interactions that UI designers can lean on.
So, how do you know when it is ok to hide features and ask your audience to learn your application? Is ‘learnability’ now more important than usability? People like to feel that they are making progress. Whatmakesthemclick.net I recently wrote a short post listing my initial thoughts of ‘Reeder’ the RSS app for Mac. I had heard so many superlatives about it from others that I was compelled to give it a try. Despite these initial UX grumbles, I know there is a huge audience out there who love using ‘Reeder’ and find using it a breeze. So, what factors allow you the chance to experiment with your user interface? Importance Frequency Cost Alternatives Simplicity Examples Summary. UX is for Cheesemakers, Too. I’ve worked as a user experience designer for large corporations and agencies for a few years now, and have found a lot of inflated terminology creeping into my vocabulary—alarming anyone who hasn’t ‘gone corporate’.
So when I was asked to help a small Orkney Island dairy farm to sell their product, I had cause to rethink: do most of the phrases and practices we use actually mean anything to anyone but us? I have no doubt that the service and UX design ethos works. How can you design something great for someone without knowing enough about what they actually want? User Experience practitioners have learned that it’s not enough to focus on the point at which the customer hits a site and forget them once they leave.
UX design is now united with service design in wanting to know what their customers had for breakfast—we want as much information as we can get. In truth, for very small businesses, UX and service design practices would appear to be an impractical luxury. The Farmers The Cows 3. Official Usability, UX & UI Guidelines From Companies.