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iRise partner OneSpring has updated their popular “SimDK for iPhones” and graciously allowed us to post the new iDoc as “iRise for iPhone” for download on the iRise site. This iDoc gives iPhone developers the ability to visualize iPhone applications early in the process. Functions simulated include the ability to quickly prototype the look, feel and behavior of iPhone applications, including screen transitions, typing and sliding.
To download the free iRise for iPhones iDoc, click here.
iRise for iPhones is a complete toolkit for the design of custom iPhone applications. It was built using visual elements and artifacts directly from Apple’s SDK, to which only approved Apple developers have access, thus allowing business analysts and interface designers who do not have access to Apple’s SDK to model app behavior early in the process.
iRise for iPhones offers a template guide that matches the form factor of the iPhone to help ensure designs can be accurately reproduced with the Apple SDK. iRise for iPhones includes:
o iPhone iDoc visualization template with guides;
o Menu icons w/ buttons;
o Custom button template;
o Slider and button action behaviors; and,
o Multi-touch actions.
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We just posted a new iRise iDoc for free download that contains 1,000 16×16 icons for use in iRise visualizations. Since all of the icons are maintained in a datasheet, you can easily add your own. Searching and tagging make it easy and fast to find the icon you need. Import the iDoc to your Definition Center so everyone can use it. To get the free iDoc, click here.
NOTE: This iDoc contains icons and other images created by Mark James and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. Your use of any of these icons and images is governed by that agreement. Additional information is available here: http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/. This iDoc and any of its content is provided AS-IS. By downloading this iDoc you acknowledge and agree that neither iRise nor any iRise licensor makes any warranty whatsoever regarding this iDoc or any of its content, and iRise and its licensors hereby disclaim all implied warranties, including without limitation any implied warranty of non-infringement.
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Congratulations to valued customers Anders Jangbrand of CSC, Pete Dowling of UPS, and Ashley Hall, randomly selected from among the many e-learning course evaluation respondents who provided feedback on the iRise e-learning that launched back in August. Our three winners each received a $25 Amazon gift certificate with our compliments. Enjoy!
Customer feedback is extremely important to us as we look for ways to improve and expand our current training offerings (in fact, look for an announcement next week regarding our newest additions, which were largely the result of customer input). To show our appreciation to those of you who take the time to provide this feedback, we plan to repeat our random drawing each quarter. All you need to do to enter is complete one of our courses, and then follow the link to the online evaluation on the course launch page. You will be entered once for each course you evaluate. Happy learning!
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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?
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The Catalyze Community July 23rd Webcast features two design experts sharing their thought on Personas:
Catalyze July Webcast – Wednesday July 23rd at 11am PDT/2pm EDT
Death to Personas! Long Live Personas!
The Catalyze July Webcast features design experts, Elizabeth Bacon of Devise and Steve Calde of Cooper talking about Personas. Elizabeth and Steve will address the misconceptions around the use of personas and share some best practices for leveraging personas during the research and design phase.
- fluffy
- expensive to create
- non-actionable
- limiting
- counterproductive to innovation
If you can’t wait for the webcast to learn more about personas, check out these two resources:
- Steve Calde’s article for the Cooper Journal called “Using Personas to Create User Documentation“
- Bill Cooper’s essay on the Origins of Personas
And here is some background information on our speakers:
Elizabeth Bacon is co-founder and Chief Design Officer at Devise, a boutique interaction design and software development consultancy. She began her career at Cooper, where she researched and designed products and also helped to refine methodology. She subsequently worked for five years at St. Jude Medical, a Fortune 500 company where she designed solutions for implantable medical devices and clinical systems. She is also presently the Vice-President of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, an international organization for advancing the profession of interaction design
Steve Calde is a Principal Design Consultant at Cooper, where he’s been helping to make the digital world a safer place for users since 1998. Steve has worked on scores of design projects in diverse domains such as golf course irrigation, IT administration, online radio, enterprise resource management, intravenous medication delivery, telecommunications, and more. Steve also teaches Cooper’s Interaction Design Practicum and Communicating courses. In a previous life, Steve was a technical writer for Rational Systems and GW Associates (semiconductor factory automation).
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I wrote a blog post in April about my thoughts on Innovation, the Federal Government and iRise. In response to the post, I received a comment this week asking about the correlation between CMMI ACQ and iRise and decided that the best way to answer would be in a new blog post.
First, some background information for the uninitiated. CMMI for ACQ (acquisition) is a Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) model designed for use in managing a supply chain by those who acquire, procure, or otherwise select and purchase products and services for business purposes. General Motors is partnering with Software Engineering Institute on developing this model and more on CMMI ACQ can be found from the Software Engineering Institute website.
Interestingly, this question also came up at the Government Executive Roundtable that iRise hosted on May 9th. A panel of representatives from aerospace/defense, government, academia, and manufacturing came together to have a conversation about innovation. One of the key questions was how could large complex teams (spanning many time zones, buildings, functional silos, government regulations, contractual terms, and the diversity and richness of human culture and textual / spoken words) do a better job of buying (acquiring) and making (building, extending, integrating, customizing, implementing) software to address massively complex “running the business of the government” capabilities for this new century. Especially where bureaucracy is dead and the network take its place?
At the highest level, Keith Glennan, CTO of Northrop Grumman IT Solutions spoke about demands for the “next generation enterprise”. “Agile and engaged talent” and “enterprise operational velocity” combined with a “distinct customer experience” are needed to address mega trends such as emerging virtual economies, geo politics, economics, demographics, environment, and developing markets.
Keith also pointed out that, “Simulation and Analytics”, “Social Networking & Collaboration” and “Continuous Strategy” were three of the “Top 5″ IT Enabling Strategies. More specifically he shared some thoughts around communicates of practices, virtual worlds, and Wiki. His concluding point was: “Innovation is defined as an organization’s ability to creatively combine new and existing technologies, processes and organizational capabilities to form unique or even disruptive solutions that add differentiating value to the business.”
Finally, Keith talked about the need to “do more with less” and “to make a difference”. iRise enables companies to see or discover how to accomplish this and then to build something that gets it done.
This discussion set the stage for Rich Frost from General Motors to then talk about “making innovation happen” including the broad spectrum from “generating ideas” to “constructing a solution” to a “solution that customers use” on a global basis. Why GM and what’s the connection with government? Like the Federal government, GMs has outsourced all needs for IT services and software, for decades. Are there an lessons to be learned there? Most definitely as GM is collaborating with the SEI at Carnegie Mellon, with the DoD and NASA for “Acquisition”.
Rich’s opening comments summarized the GM mission for IT very well and puts ACQ into perspective:
- IT Executives must continuously drive Innovation*, Efficiency, and Security
- IT Executives must consciously balance their internal staff and supplier sourcing
GM drives innovation and performance with:
- Integrated processes based on CMMI-ACQ
- Incremental Delivery Lifecycle
- Visualization
Rich mentioned that 75% of every IT dollar spend within government and the commercial world is spent on Acquisition, but that CMMI focused on the developer and development, not the customer and outcomes. “Requirements” were identified as the key element for success along with architecture, project management, and “supplier alignment”. Rich also talked about how visualizing capabilities with stakeholders is a key enabler and how visualization drives “ethical” partnerships with suppliers.
He also correlated iRise visualization with CMMI-ACQ at GM with these 10 points:
- Bring the “Idea to Life” early in process
- Mature, Validate, and Refine before building
- Low fidelity prototypes built early to show ideas
- Rapid iteration and refinement before coding
- Visualization accelerates construction
- Communication vehicle for idea generator
- Construction team builds the right solution
- Visualization also accelerates adoption
- Users provide feedback and suggestions on new ideas
- Users know about new innovations and feel buy-in
The bottom line correlation between CMMI-ACQ and iRise is VISUALIZE TO MODERNIZE and SIMULATE TO INNOVATE.
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iRise recently conducted a national survey of IT professionals around application definition. The survey revealed that 72% of IT professionals are suffering from increased development cost due to rework and scope creep . According to the survey, poor communication is a fundamental problem. Respondents cited “business stakeholders not being fully invested in the definition process’ or ‘having unrealistic expectations of the end result,” as the key problem in application definition communication.
Last week’s blog post by Forrester Research’s Carey Schwaber, “Which Vendors Have Made A Difference In App Dev?” 
acknowledged iRise for “waking up the market to the limitations of textual requirements.” This survey shows that many IT professionals are still in need of “awakening.”
Additional survey findings include:
- Over 60% of companies experienced delays, cost overruns and missing features in an application development project in the past two years;
- IT professionals that are prototyping applications are using MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint and MS Visio to document requirements, and over 60% of these respondents are not fully satisfied with their current method of defining applications;
- 30% of participants said that they are not testing applications before development at all; and,
- Almost 80% of respondents are interested in eliciting customer feedback using a fully functional prototype before coding.
To download the free executive report of this survey visit:
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We are proud to announce the winners in the iRise “Visualize the Prize” Video Commercial Contest. The 15 semi-finalists received more than 4,500 votes during the two weeks of voting that ended on June 20th, and it was a pretty tight race.
The winning entry was “iRise Recipe” submitted by Brian Palatucci of Santa Monica, California. Brian wins $15,000 for his video which depicts a man preparing dinner for his girlfriend while asking the question, “What if there was a way to learn from your mistakes without ever having to make one?”
There were 2 runners-up entries that each claimed a prize of $2,500.
“Foresight is 20/20” by Michael Beeson of Great Falls, Montana – This video looked at iRise from the perspective of a spectacle manufacturer which lost its focus before trying iRise. “It’s made painful hindsight a thing of the past because thanks to iRise, foresight is now 20/20.”
“A Celebration of iRise” by Ron Rogers of Healdsburg, California – This video compared the process of developing company Web sites to the wine industry which doesn’t reveal the finished product until the very end. “Now that calls for a celebration!”
Visit the official contest website to check out the semi-finalists and all contest entries.
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At iRise, we have been preaching for many years that words by themselves do a poor job of defining the requirements for software applications. So, it’s refreshing to see someone else – especially a Forrester analyst – pile on to the discussion.
Tom Grant, a senior analyst in the Technology Marketing group at Forrester, published a research document this week titled “Improving Your Product Management Tools”. While the note is targeted at product marketing and management professionals, the roles and tasks performed by these workers have significant if not total overlap with business analyst and usability professions.
The problem is actually double-edged. According to Tom, “most product managers rely on tools – predominantly Microsoft Office – that do not adequately support them.” And while there are tools specifically designed to handle product requirements, the majority of technology companies do not embrace them.
Tom further identifies 6 functions needed to address the requirements challenges for product managers and describes the shortcomings of trying to use Microsoft Office, Web 2.0 tools and CRM systems:
- Collection
- Analysis
- Prediction
- Connection
- Communication
- Updates
By the way, iRise was mentioned as one of the tools for the Communication function which Tom defines as modeling or simulating use cases to communicate to stakeholders.
Tom’s research also pointed out that innovators are more than twice as likely to adopt requirements tools. He examined companies based on their size, company age and product delivery and found that requirements tools were adopted at a much higher rate in companies that were 1-5 years old, smaller than 500 employees and who used software as a service (SaaS) delivery.
The full 16-page report is available from Forrester for $279 and is worth a read for anyone involved in defining and managing requirements. You can also read Tom Grant’s blog at this link and he welcomes feedback.
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Carey Schwaber, Senior Analyst from Forrester Research presented at the iRise-sponsored June Catalyze community webcast last week.
In addition to presenting her top 10 list of ways to improve project outcomes for business analysts and others involved in software definition, Carey answered nearly 20 questions from the audience. If you missed the live broadcast, you will definitely want to listen to the webcast recording so you can hear Carey’s unique perspective on the role of business analysts, software definition and requirements.
For a sneak preview, here is a peak at Carey’s top 10 list:
- Define the business-IT division of labor
- Be part of the team
- Understand and communicate impact
- Define future as well as present business needs
- Remember non-functional requirements
- Make requirements painless for the business
- Measure project progress in terms of requirements
- Don’t rely solely on text
- Maximize feedback on requirements
- Invest in future project outcomes too
The webcast was recorded and can be viewed in the iRise Media Center, and the slides from the presentation have been embedded below.
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