unity-design team mailing list archive

[Christian Giordano <christian.giordano@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Choosing the best tool for mocking up designs is not easy.

It depends first from what you want to get from it. In which design phase
are you? Remember that visual design can affect the distribution of
elements in the screen. So testing layouts without rendering can be quite
unproductive. Is it to form my mental model? Is it for user testing?

Then depending on which tool you know best (faster with), of course.

Bottom line, is quite personal and has to be tight to your design process.


chr



On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 9:27 AM, Thorsten Wilms <t_w_@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 06/12/2012 11:27 PM, Gregory Merchan wrote:
>
>> Whatever the case, I don't know that there's a tool to make good
>> on-screen design easy. I know about Glade and some wireframing apps,
>> but I still see designers drawing by hand, so I take it the tools
>> aren't good enough yet. (Or maybe people are picking the wireframing
>> apps that look hand-drawn?) Be it RAD or wireframing tools, they all
>> seem to focus too much on laying out controls in dialogs and not
>> enough on designing the core information manipulation parts of
>> applications. It's not surprising we don't see more direct
>> manipulation when the tools don't help make it so.
>>
>
> Nothing beats the immediacy of drawing by hand. It's easier to not waste
> time on precision in the early stages, to quickly sketch a design and to
> scrap it, instead of reworking it like software invites you to.
>
> The purpose of the hand-drawn look from wireframing software is to
> communicate the preliminary character and to make clear it is not a
> screenshot, that there might be no implementation at all. It also means you
> don't have to make up a visual style before you can get to the real deal.
>
> One could say there are 2 different sides to GUI-design that can be hard
> to combine:
> Creating new/custom solutions for specific cases
> vs
> working with a framework of already existing widgets and patterns, to stay
> consistent.
>
> An authoring tool like Flash is great for the former, but does not do
> much, if anything, for the later. I don't know how far the capabilities of
> a tool like Axure reach, in this regard. What I do know is that we have
> neither as Free Software.
>
>
> In a better world, trying (as an example) how Unity's Launcher feels like,
> when taking full screen height, would only require tweaking one layout file
> and a restart.
>
> In a even better world, a gesture would switch Unity into layout mode, and
> you could change the layout right there.
>
>
> --
> Thorsten Wilms
>
> thorwil's design for free software:
> http://thorwil.wordpress.com/
>
> --
> Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~unity-**design<https://launchpad.net/~unity-design>
> Post to     : unity-design@lists.launchpad.**net<unity-design@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~unity-**design<https://launchpad.net/~unity-design>
> More help   : https://help.launchpad.net/**ListHelp<https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp>
>