merhl

What is a Vision Prototype?

Well, its many things. First off its used in the UX process as a key deliverable when creating large applications that need some extensive feedback. After Discovery, Persona creation, Wireframes, and the Design Framework is complete then this is the beginning of the Vision Prototype.

The Vision Prototype is usually built in the technology that the final production application would be built in and uses the design framework. This allows for the production developers to take the skins and even some minor pieces of the Vision Prototype and integrate it into the final production application, which would already be in its architecture phase while the Vision Prototype is being built. After working with several developers the skinning of the application sometimes can take longer then building the architecture so this process sometimes saves a large amount of time for the developers, and many I have talked to do not like doing this step anyway. You can see the overlap of progress in the graph below.

So what is it used for?

I think if the Vision Prototype wasn’t looked at as just throw away code and actually pieces of it used I think this helps increase the application building process and helps the Client see real progress. I can see this process even more with the introduction to Adobe Flash Catalyst and similar tools which I can see increasingly being built. But I think for now the process of the Vision Prototype takes a very skilled person that can understand UX/Design and some Development. The more the skins can be separated from the architecture the better as well as the interaction models which is a bit trickier with large applications.

I plan on doing a couple more posts on the Vision Prototype and hopefully show some code and maybe even do a sample application and walk through the UX process and maybe have a guest Developer do a couple posts on the Development integration.

I was extremely excited to see the amount of people at my 360|Flex presentation, considering it was at 8:30am in the morning. So for the one’s that slept in, thats cool I understand, so just for you here are my slides. Oh and for the people that couldn’t make it to 360|Flex this is for you as well. Hopefully in the near future I might be doing this preso again.

I will be on my way to Indy next week to give my FLEXperience presentation at 360|Flex. I wanted to give a brief outline and some background of the presentation to anyone that might be interested. If you want to see all the juicy details then you will have to make the trip to 360|Flex and see it in person.

Image courtesy of http://www.getfinch.com/

I will be diving into the the UX process and how it integrates with Flex and some of the key deliverables in the UX process. When approaching RIA’s from a UX perspective it has a lot of the basic UX processes just a bit more geared to the Flex environment. Doing this allows for a smooth transition from one stage to another and allows for some parallel tasks.

So I will be getting into detail on the process and showing examples of

I look forward to seeing other great sessions and chatting it up with fellow 360|Flexers.

I work on a lot of enterprise applications that use a wide variety of charting. Now charting itself is not the most glamorous thing in the world but the data can tell a great story and lets users make better business discussions. So that said why do so many application that use charting look so ugly? For example just do a google image search on charting. There are a few that aren’t bad but for the most part they are all the same and not very flattering to look at.

So I created some sample charts that hopefully look better then the average charting components in Flex and other software programs. I do use good ol degrafa to skin some of the charts but for the most part these are standard out of the box charting components. Obviously there are some graphs that are little more customized but I think you get the point.

Just customizing the tooltips is a big improvement, and setting the axis fonts, and even removing some of the tic marks will help.