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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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iRise premier partner id8 recently wrote a very interesting blog post called “Simulate Anything“. In the post, Scott Nelson suggested we start thinking outside of the montior too feel the benefits of using visualization on non-web applications. He speaks about a visualization his team put together (see the video here) of a hand-held barcode scanner.
Given his desire to push the prototyping methodology way outside to web-based applications, he started simply walking around and finding non-web interfaces he could simulate with iRise. His thermostat and microwave both provided interesting opportunities to improve the user interface with visualization. Another iRise partner, OneSpring, has begun visualizing applications for the iPhone.
What types of interfaces could you see yourself visualizing? Me personally, I’d like to see my “all-in-one remote control” reworked 
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iRise Web Seminar : Secret Sauce for Web Site Success
Join Douglas K. van Duyne, Principal & Founder of Naviscent on February 12th @ 10am PT as he keynotes the iRise Web Seminar.
First 50 people to register and attend receive a copy of Design of Sites!
You’ve worked hard to develop Websites and software, investing in product planning and development time. If you didn’t meet all your goals, you’re not alone. Now, imagine you learn the secret sauce to know how to invest your money for maximum benefit, and achieve your business ambitions. Douglas van Duyne, thought-leader, best-selling author, and principal of Naviscent, consulting to clients such as Oracle, eBay, Yahoo, Agilent, Autodesk and others, will take you through some practical exercises from his forthcoming book on mastering interface management.
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Happy Holidays
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Author, thought-leader and marketing guru Seth Godin is offering an amazing opportunity for you come work with him for 6 months. It’s not going to be easy to get though. You’ll have to convince him that you’re worthy and willing to drop everything to take advantage of it.
Here’s what he’s planning for the six months:
- One hour a day of class/dialogue
- Four hours a day of working on his projects
- Three hours a day of working on your personal project
- Five hours a day of living, noticing, doing and connecting
Here are some key dates:
- Deadline for applications: December 14, 2008
- Open house in his office by invitation only: December 16.
- Start date: January 19, 2009
Read all about it here http://www.squidoo.com/Alternative-MBA
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I hear from a lot of customers that find visualization a bit overwhelming at first. It’s a new way to explore business needs and hear directly from your stakeholders and customers before costly development begins. iRise is the market leader in visualization. Over 200 customers have improved their processes by visualizing their needs.
So to help you begin your first journey, I’ve decided to put together a getting starting guide for you.
- (5min) Browse the iRise Product Overview Video. Take a quick look at visualization and how it can benefit you. There are plenty of customer testimonials and product videos in the Media center if you are interested.
- (15min) Take the iRise Product Tour. Explore how iRise can help you based on your role in the company.
- (15min) Download iRise. iRise offers a free fully-functioning 30 day trial of the iRise Professional Edition product. Individual business analysts, interface designers and project managers can leverage powerful visualization techniques already in use by hundreds of corporate customers to get business critical software projects to market faster, with less cost and risk.
- (4+hrs) Take the iRise eLearning courses. iRise helps get you started with 2 free eLearning courses. iRise Overview, a self-paced, eLearning course designed to introduce iRise to anyone responsible for selecting and/or using iRise on a project and iRise Explained, a self-paced, eLearning course that covers an introduction to the basic capabilities of iRise and how to use such capabilities to elicit and validate requirements and designs for page flow, page layout, navigation, data, business logic, high fidelity user interfaces and dynamic user interaction using actions, events, alternate views, styles, templates and masters..
- (5min) Download the Common Samples iDoc. This iDoc can be opened in your trial version of iRise and gives you a number of useful visualization examples. Copy and paste what you need into your new project. Want to see how high definition, data driven visualizations are done? Use the Common Samples iDoc as a guide. Speed up learning and get your next project kicked off fast.
That’s it, you’ve developed a high level understanding of iRise and visualization. Now you have 29 days left on your trial, get visualizing!
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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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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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Even if you’re a not a writer or lover of words, it is still important to note that today is the 80th birthday of the First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary or OED as it more commonly known. The OED bills itself as the “definitive record of the English language” and is one of the most famous dictionaries in history.
The OED was a major collaborative efforts and a precursor of today’s Wikipedia. During the 70 years from it’s approval date to it publish date on June 6, 1928, the OED went through many editors. Sir James Murray shepherded it from 1879 to 1915, and probably had the biggest influence on the work.
The official policy of the OED was to:
- “present in alphabetical series the words that have formed the English vocabulary from the time of the earliest records [ca. AD740] down to the present day, with all the relevant facts concerning their form, sense-history, pronunciation, and etymology. It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang”
Here are some quick facts about the First Edition of the OED:
- Actual size – 10 volumes, 15,490 pages
- Time to complete – 70 years
- Number of entries – 252,200
- Number of contributors – 2,000
- Number of quotations submitted – 5 million
And here are some quick links to check out when you have more time:
- OED website
- OED Facts
- OED Word of the Day
- The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester - “this is a scintillating account of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language” and well worth the read if you want to become an expert on the OED
While iRise is trying to do away with textual word-based requirements documents, we still love words and the English language! Take a moment today and reflect on the efforts of so many to bring sense and order to our English language.
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