Tools & Software

In a session entitled "Tabula Rasa - Methods for jumping into UI Design" at the recently held User Experience Camp in Washington (#uxcampdc), Brian Talbot lead us in a discussion on starting with a blank slate. A number of great ideas came out of that discussion.

I was at a conferences yesterday and the speaker demonstrated several tools that you may find useful for selecting color schemes

Earlier this year, the University of Baltimore (UB) conducted usability testing on Drupal's admin interface with web developers already familiar with other CMS in the same space, but with no prior Drupal experience.

Product Planner is a slick and simple web application that allows a user to "discover, create, and share user flows."

Scrapblog is what Apple would have done in 6 months with iLife's iWeb. It brings together photos from Flickr, movies from YouTube into a web-based photoediting interface, where you can create a scrapbook of photos, movies, on nice preset layouts and backgrounds. You can then post it like a blog entry to their site or to your blog, allowing comments to be posted.

Wireframes have been an indispensable tool for information architects to present and communicate the web page layouts and content placement to clients and developers. In revisiting our wireframes templates, I wanted to tackle a couple of issues that have been brought up across the years since I last wrote anything on the matter:

A reader of my last post, Prototyping for the Masses, brought to my attention an online tool used to create simulations of web applications called Simunication. I thought it would be good to add these kinds of tools to my list of prototyping resources.

In a previous post, I talked about the notion of "looking before you leap" as it relates to designing a website. Part of this "looking," or exploration stage, can be enhanced by prototyping.