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What is the best tool to draw an idea?
I have one twitter based idea which I have put in words. But I would like to have a prototype which contains screens and will show how exactly the homepage, other pages will look like. Basically it should explain the complete flow of the application. What is the best and easiest tool to do that?
- yannis 17y agoHTML
- abhishekdesai 17y agoHTML is good but I guess it may take more time
- yannis 17y agoYes it may take a day or two, but there is nothing like communicating an interface and what you actually want to do with an actual pre-prototype. I view it as a step before communicating with code see http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-... It will also help later on in allocating tasks and workflow to other members of the team. As you develop code just update the prototype.
- abhishekdesai 17y agoCool
- satyajit 17y agoIf you're on Mac, OmniGraffle! http://balsamiq.com/ http://balsamiq.com/ on the web is good for prototyping as well. Windows, hmmm .... Vizio???
- abhishekdesai 17y agoOk let me try it. Thanks.
- chrischen 17y agoWow I've been using pencil but I keep losing the paper. This is good!
- andymism 17y agoOmniGraffle and Balsamiq are great for higher fidelity prototyping, but I find that the precision it allows and the care I end up taking pushing my mouse gets in the way of getting ideas down. I usually stick to a fat pen and paper or whiteboard. When I'm done, I scan each page or take photos of sections of the whiteboard and then load them up as a presentation in Google Docs (easy to share with partners). No losing papers or accidental erasures there!
- idlewords 17y agoPencil
- pvg 17y agoI thought paper might also be handy but on deeper consideration, I realized you are right. "I have this twitter-based idea. I've brought a pencil so you can stab your eyes out while I explain"
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoI up-modded but I actually use a fat felt-tip pen (aka fibre-tip). Pencil allows you to add lots of detail if you want to, you can't do that with a big fat pen as you just end up shading the thing in. Interactive white board might be good (you can build one using a wiimote in a famous internet howto).
- movix 17y agoSounds mad, but even though we have CS3 and most other graphics/design packages, we use the drawing tools in Powerpoint a lot to do quick web page layouts or site designs, regardless of what PP's actually meant for. The reasons are this: anyone can use the tools without have to learn anything, it's really quick, the way it works tends to make you keep things simple (very important), you can create a template page and then cmd+V it across all the other pages (slides), you can scroll through the pages (try doing that in Photoshop), easy output to pdf/jpgs etc if you want to share and of course if you want to present the design...well 'nuff said. If you're designing for Twitter I'm assuming that graphically you're doing something very clean and simple. This method helps you keep it that way.
- abhishekdesai 17y agoSounds like a cool idea. Never thought of PP in this way. Will surely give it a try.
- movix 17y agoHere's one we're working on to give you an idea: http://www.movix.co.uk/reelsapp.jpg http://www.movix.co.uk/reelsapp.jpg