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The process feels a little disjointed and could be smoother, but this is a common problem with paper prototyping and on the whole I think it’s a nice idea.

One concern I do have however, is how long the paper templates took to create. Surely you could put something together Axure or similar in a shorter time, and which would be more reusable than these pieces of paper…?

Quince: UI Design Patterns

Barry — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:38:11 +0000

Now bare with me on this – I found a blog site which contains a review of a really useful site containing UX libraries, which is doubly noteworthy because it presents the patterns in a very usable and very lovely UI.

So, my dilemma is do I post a link to the review or direct to the site with the patterns?

I’ll start by posting a link to the blog site I found the link on, as the blog owner, Patrick Neeman does a really nice job of explaining the patterns site’s features:

Patrick Neeman’s blog: http://www.usabilitycounts.com/2009/02/03/cool-website-tuesdays-infragistics-quince/

And Patrick’s comment:

I can never say Infragistics right, but they produce top notch controls for the ASP.NET world. Now they have something else that is way cool: Quince, a great little directory of user interface patterns that is built using SilverLight. J. Ambrose Little, a User Experience guy over there, wrote an extensive blog post about the new tool.
You can navigate through different patterns four different ways (I find user tasks especially useful), search them via keyword, and see sort through them by letter. Very, very easy to use.
The best part? If you have a design pattern you want to submit, you can do it through the site, and the Infragistics team will review it and post it. It’s got all the requisite social networking tools with it!

And here’s a couple of screenshots of the Quince site:

Quince patterns explorer - View by wireframe location

Quince patterns explorer - Pattern detail

Followed by the all important link: http://quince.infragistics.com/

Enjoy!

Flash Catalyst – new wireframing tool from Adobe

Barry — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:08:19 +0000

Now this is interesting…

Flash Catalyst (Fc) is a new product from Adobe. It’s still in early beta at the moment but its generating a bit of a buzz.

It aims to be an interactive wireframing and prototyping tool, along the same lines as Axure, with a strong designer/developer workflow built in.

Fc produces swf files instead of HTML files and can either be used to create wireframes from scratch or can import ‘well-formed’ Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator documents, converting their layers into interactive elements within your prototype (it can also export Adobe Flex prototypes if required…)

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/

This is a great demonstration/presentation given at the recent ADOBE MAX 2008 conference:

(Source: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f15384v1003 )

I’ll certainly be keeping my eyes peeled for a public beta in the near future!