Aug 15 2008

What were some of your first visualization tools?

Published by Ray Walker at 4:11 pm under Community, Design, Innovation, Multimedia, visualization

I’ve been here at iRise for nearly a year now.  I came onboard because I had never seen a tool like this before.  iRise has changed the way I visualize new web site and designs, but I haven’t always had access to such a powerful tool (don’t forget to download a 30-day trial if you haven’t yet).  Nope, there was a time in my life I had to use other tools.

Tools like:

  • Adobe Photoshop - Photoshop has long been my tool of choice.  It offered no interaction, but I had plenty of reusable assets to speed my process.
  • MS Powerpoint - I often used Powerpoint in conjunction with Photoshop to share my vision.
  • HTML - For me, one of the slower yet powerful ways to visualize
  • Flash - The slowest way to visualize (for me anyways)

These were fine for visualizing my point, but then I needed a way to collaborate with my stakeholders.  For that, I used:

  • Printouts - Printouts were nice because they let the user write notes that I could then collect and iterate on.
  • Magnets - Yep, that’s right.  I printed out web widgets on magnetic paper and used them on whiteboards.  I would model a page of standard widgets, collaborate with the team and then take a quick photo of the result.

These were the only tools I had to get my point across.  

What were some of your early visualization tools?

One Response to “What were some of your first visualization tools?”

  1. Denison 30 Sep 2008 at 5:25 am

    Hi,

    I’ve been using magnets, Serena and Powerpoint. i’ve been using iRise for a short time, but I can not see how you can simulate more than 1.0 or SAP GUI interface. How can you simulate Web 2.0 features like complex datagrid ? Am I missing something?

    I am sticked for know to magnets and Powerpoint. I would prefer a nice solution like iRise, with data testing, use cases, etc…

    Cheers,

    Denis

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