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Where’s my GUI designer for lo-fi prototyping? June 29, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : software, development , 2 comments

At my current client we have been spending time doing a little release planning. This has included creating some mock-ups of screens for a system that until now has been batch-oriented. So far we’ve been creating these mock-ups in the most lo-fi way possible; scribbled on the back of an index card. I had the good opportunity to recently receive some insights into the process from my colleague Luke Barrett who is a whizz at producing GUI prototypes within Powerpoint, which may sound strange but he really makes it work. Other’s prefer to use a wireframe template for Visio or OmniGraffle. Then there is the intriguing Napkin Look & Feel for Java’s Swing toolkit.

What I’m wondering is; can we do effective GUI prototyping using more traditional GUI building tools? What would a GUI builder targetted solely at producing prototypes look like?

A few quick thoughts I’ve had about this…

  1. Napkin LAF would be mandatory: forcing all prototypes to be rendered in a ’sketched’ fashion will reinforce in the mind of all that view them that they are just prototypes and are fair game for critique.
  2. Must be simple enough for non-technical people to use: most GUI designers I have used tend to be quite challenging to work with. Through arguable necessity they are festooned with palettes, property panels, toolbars and other assorted widgetry to build functional GUIs. This tool however could be much simpler; no event handlers need to be wired up, no futzing around with colours or fonts should be possible. Simple palettes of controls and contextual editing should suffice.
  3. Must be light on resource usage: Whilst many developers have the luxury of a high-performance workstation to satiate the resource demands of a modern IDE, most business users and domain experts generally do not. So in addition to being easy to use, this GUI designer should run well on lesser-spec’d machines.
  4. Can export completed screens/pages/dialogs to common image formats.
  5. Would include a palette of controls with common labels: I’m thinking of stuff like buttons with ‘OK’, ‘Save’ or ‘Cancel’ labels. Or perhaps drop downs populated with states/countries, etc.
  6. Should support grids/tables to be set up easily: Most database-backed systems will have several screens that involve the display of tabular data so the prototyping tool should lend a hand in this area.
  7. Would support the generation of lorem ipsum text.

So what do you think? Am I onto a good idea here or is it all just YAGNI? And if it IS a good idea, would someone care to build it for me?!

FlyPod June 21, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : apple, gadgets , 2 comments

Apple needs to keep innovating in order to stay a step ahead of Microsoft’s rumoured iPod killer. Since iPod integration with your car is now passe, the next industry Apple should be trying to suck up to, errr, I mean partner with is the airlines. I want my seat to have a universal iPod dock dammit! And the ability to display video (for 5G and unreleased-video-ipod owners) on the seatback display would be fantastic for long-haul flights. So who’s going to provide it first? Groovy, funky Virgin Atlantic? Emirates? C’mon, someone get onto this quick!

Spreadsheets redux June 8, 2006

Posted by James Webster in : google , add a comment

I’ve now had the opportunity to play with Google Spreadsheets a bit more and I have to say… wow.

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