EUROIA2006
In my eyes Day Two had more substance than had day one.
The first panel, Pros and Cons of Different Wireframing Techniques (Marion Böing, David Carruthers, Rob Goris, Jacco Nieuwland, Filip Borloo), dealt with different types of wireframes and prototyping techniques. It was quite interesting to hear pro- and contra-Visio panellist discuss how they worked. I was glad that one of the panellist proudly stated that she soon would be doing her prototyping in Axure RP Pro. We have used Axure for more than 1½ years and I it’s a great tool. I’d never use Visio again for this kind of work.
One panellist told that he is using a combination of Photoshop and InDesign to generate and maintain extremely high fidelity graphical “wireframes” and flowcharts. I was impressed by his method as it was a brilliant approach if you need to do a lot of key page designs, but the time one will have to spend maintaining this kind of prototype… man. That method seemed incredibly laborious.
Next up was Jared Volkmann to present his Customer Experience Framework. An excellent and fast paced presentation that took us through the three main stages in defining the customers’ behavior. It’s all about Who’s visiting? Why are they visiting? and What are they doing? Well – I guess we all know that these questions are important, but Volkmann’s framework makes it easy to communicate to the client why the work must be done. Volkmann stressed that a combination of thourough log analysis and surveys is important to understand how how the users are behaving and why they are behaving the way they are.
The second panel of the day was about IA Education In Europe. It was lead by the very engaged but also quite talkative Dr. Heiko Haubitz who teaches IA at the University of Dublin. Unfortunately his own presentation stole some of the very precious time from the panel. IA education is an important topic but I don’t feel the panel got the room it needed. Dr. Heiko, Dr. Madsen and especially Dr. Thull all deserved more time to present their views. Also I would’ve liked to hear much more from Boris Mueller who very briefly (due to a constantly crashing Adobe Reader (that’s one-nill to Powerpoint)) showed us some very exciting designs made by his students. More of that next year, please: Examples of concrete work.
Bogo Vatovec delivered one of the great presentation of the EUROIA 2006. He talked about Content Adaptation to Mobile Devices – how well does different systems adapt browser-targeted content to mobile devices? Not well at all, Vatovec revealed. None of the tested CA systems managed to transform the test sites into anything usable. Vatovecs research was thorough and his presentation downright funny. The big question in my mind is, though: Is automatic content adaptation the way to go? Is it possible to design for both pc browsers and small mobile units? I’m not sure about that.
Jason Mesut and Warren Hutchinson from Framfab UK demonstrated their concept of The Wicked Workshop. Nothing new under the sun here, but nevertheless an ok presentation on how to make a workshop a workshop and not just yet another boting meeting.
The closing keynote was made by the eccentrically dressed but brilliant Dr. Steven Pemperton of the CWI. Dr. Pemperton is chairman of the W3C html and Xforms working group and told us about xhtml2 and how it will take html to the next level by allowing for sematic markup – microformats done the right way, as Dr. Pemperton called it.
Thanks to EUROIA, ASIS&T and the comittee for putting this great event together.
Mr Silberbauer – Nice and clear excerpt of the both EUROIA days. Can completely identify myself in your observations. Funny, I had to smile when I read your comment on my contribution of the wireframing panel! I’ve spoken to many people about this approach and everybody is impressed but also scared to death using it because of the high maintenance. What I didn’t make very clear I guess is that I use this approach for software design, not for websites. This really makes a big difference. Non-web software (especially b2b) normally contains a relative low number of different screens but the interaction with different components on the screen is much higher. Although with the rise of Ajax this is gonna be the case for sites too. But yeah, for most web-IA’s at this point in time, I would almost say “Don’t try this at home kiddies!”
Mr. Goris,
thanks for your comments.
You’re absolutely right that the advance of AJAX calls for different prototyping methods than do normal web design, and we certainly need to look at what you application designers have been doing for years. There may be something to learn
Also, while wireframe prototypes are great for old school web-IA, sometimes we need to test the graphic design too in interactive prototypes. The users do react differently to black/grey/white wireframes than to real web pages.
I think that a combination of Photoshop and Axure is a way to go. Even though Axure is mainly a wireframing tool, by copy/pasting graphics into dynamic layers in Axure and adding different mouse events, one can easily create quite sophisticated graphic prototypes without too much Photoshop labour – besides what it takes to do the graphics, of course. Also, the Axure “elements” make it possible to centralise your objects, either as page templates or as what corresponds to the Dreamweaver “library items”. Thus you can reuse your elements all over the prototype and avoid redundancy, something that even Photoshop CS2 “smart objects” don’t support that well. In that way a graphic designer may maintain the graphic elements while the IA can focus on updating the interaction design.
Axure makes it possible to simulate some AJAX-ish interactions too, but it’ll need some kind of scripting-engine to make it suitable for prototyping real AJAX stuff. Maybe we’ll see that in upcoming versions.