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What's the best website prototyping/wireframe/greyscreening product(s) you have used?
I am curious to know what processes/practices/products/tools people here are using for creating wireframes and greyscreening their websites and web applications?
What have you found that works particularly well for you and is there anything you think deserves mentioning?
- melvinram 18y agoPaper & pencil works best. Pen works as well. If you're looking for more technical whiz bang option, I like Freehand which used to be made by Macromedia. Photoshop works too. Visio has always seemed like a poor tool for the task. Might be my lack of knowledge on how to use it. Dreamweaver is nice too. I like to just pick a standard template to start with and try to add as much content as I think the final site will have. Design can come later. Now that I'm thinking about it, WordPress could be used to hash out content as well.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- babul 18y agoPen and paper is best for very early concept design but quickly becomes a chore for complex sites. To resolve this, I have tried LucidSpec (http://www.elegancetech.com http://www.elegancetech.com) and AxureRP-Pro (http://www.axure.com http://www.axure.com) which are better in many ways than using Visio and even Freehand to a lesser extent. I like my early prototypes to focus less on graphical elements and more on functionality, user flow and interaction, and the latter tools make the mock look “too real” hence people focus on elements that are not so important at the early stages e.g. colours. Dreamweaver remains the best for balancing creativity and productivity (concepts can be realised quickly as they are already partially built). Photoshop seems to be best for pure creativity (provided you have sufficient skill to cut up your designs and implement them). What I am really interested in is the grey screening part. Thoughts? Thanks.
- melvinram 18y agoI just checked out the videos of the two websites. They look fantastic, especially Axure. If I building a complex app, I'd probably use it. As for grey screening, I've never heard the term. I searched on Google and it didn't turn up anything. What is grey screening?
- babul 18y agoWatch the video in the link... http://www.newfangled.com/web_development_prototyping_proces.. http://www.newfangled.com/web_development_prototyping_proces.... (If you don’t want to watch the video above it is summarised in 4 nice pictures at http://onwired.com/portfolio/ http://onwired.com/portfolio/) I..it is baciscally creating an interactive wireframe without the graphics and focused on structure and interaction. I am a developer, not really a designer, and working with others i have found we have some many different interpretations of meanings it is just easier to create things on the fly together. Unless you sit together in a room, this can be hard. Hence I am thinking of using Drupal as a base system for doing this.
- babul 18y agoCurrently, I mostly follow a process outlined nicely in the link below (expect for greyscreening interactively, my grey screening is done with everyone sitting and editing a Dreamweaver template based solution together)... http://www.newfangled.com/web_development_prototyping_process http://www.newfangled.com/web_development_prototyping_proces... (If you don’t want to watch the video above it is summarised in 4 nice pictures at http://onwired.com/portfolio/ http://onwired.com/portfolio/) I am thinking about using Drupal (or even Joomla to a lesser extent) as the CMS just for interactive greyscreening just so it can be done asynchronously and on a distributed basis.
- bigtoga 18y agoI downloaded Smart Draw (http://www.smartdraw.com/ http://www.smartdraw.com/) last week and it seemed promising for tedious tasks like layouts and site maps, not so much for the graphic design side. Seems like a nice tool but they have a ridiculously anti-user trial period of "7 Application Launches before time out". I didn't feel that I was able to try it out enough before it timed out on me so I didn't buy it.