This technique of demonstrating an interface using video comes up more and more often these days. It’s basically a combination between paper prototyping, video recording and then eventual sharing of it using online video web sites. Perhaps seeing the interface change with the help of real people and voice overs feels a lot more engaging then just looking at a wireframe document stack alone.

In The future of wireframes, Isaac Pinnock writes about where the wireframe is heading. Some of the possible directions include:

• Shortening of the lifespan of a wireframe
• Widening of the audience being able to contribute to wireframing
• Object-orientation and component approach, making adjustments easier to manage
• More visual than functional
• More exploratory
• Widening of the possible spectrum of wireframing tools (supporting wider ranges of fidelity)

I think I agree with most points. What I am trying to do with fluidIA is to tackle the problem of the shortening wireframe lifespan by means of making changes a great deal more easy to accomplish (through object orientation).

Just found an April fools link about the Opera browser supporting face gesture interactions. Looks quite funny and some of the gestures look a bit difficult to master. Laughing aside however, I still think this has some really interesting interaction potential. FaceAPI has been developing the technology to make this possible.

Quite some articles appeared in the last few weeks going over prototyping and wireframing tools and resources.

• Rapid Prototyping Tools (Adaptive Path)
• Get Wireframing: The All-In-One Guide (Grace Smith)
• 16 Design Tools for Prototyping and Wireframing (Sitepoint)

Nice find of 30 common patterns of rich internet application controls. – via Konigi. Ahhh… can’t get enough of jQuery samples. Last week I also came across the UI Pattern Library which also launched recently I believe. The site contains a nice collection of even more patterns and is scheduled to grow.

Just found a nice video on some very inspiring thoughts challenging UI conventions by Alex and Aza from Mozilla. Amongst a couple of insights these two in their Design Review podcast talk about are  such things as: discoverability, design for first time use vs. efficient use, context sensitive interfaces, and full screen interfaces.

Just found three interesting sources about sketching interactions, including user interfaces on Jonas Löwgren’s site.

• Sketching Interaction Design – 2004
  
• Sketching in interaction design – 2008 talk PDF
• Interaction Design Sketchbook

Inspirational material.

A little side project about design documentation samples over at wireframes.linowski.ca has just been began. I hope to collect and share these visual design techniques from information architects, interfaction designers and ux professionals (if you have something to share, don’t be shy). Enjoy.

A nice video on wireframing with Adobe Catalyst (previously called Thermo) just appeared and has some good insights into the upcoming application. Peter Flynn spends a full hour showing some of the things which are possible. Here is my take on it.

Some negative remarks:

• Page scaling? What happens when you have 30 pages? The top bar seems a bit limited in displaying the pages in a horizontal scroll area. Each page takes up quite a bit of space.
• The transitions between design and preview mode still feels very clunky just as in Flash, with the whole compilation procedure.
• Event handling is a bit limited. At least three event handlers are visible: onclick, onrollover, and onrollout. What about onkeypress, onrightclick, on ondrag? AJAX and rich interactions have more power than what can be seen in this application.
• Where are event conditions? As an example, nowadays interaction designers sometimes specify a 1-2 second delay onmouseout before menu is hidden, which can increase usability (protect an item from disappearing accidentaly). At least from the video I have not seen this visible.
• The program is a bit ambitious in claiming to deliver eventual production ready code.
• The interaction between Flash Catalyst with the importing and exporting seems a bit tricky.

Nice things:

• Thorough effect / transition order control. It is possible to control the duration and order of effects or transitions between states on a mini time line, as well as stack multiple transitions together.
• Shared objects are possible. Edit once, update everywhere.
• Independent states. Users can define multiple states for each object which are independent across objects. (just like in fluidIA) :)