ScaleNine

I’m constantly in conversations with people concerning the perfect tools for different stages during a project. One stage that seems to come up in everyone’s process is creating wireframes. I’ve heard of people using Apple’s Numbers, Fireworks or Balsamiq, which all have there pros and cons.

Tracey Varnell, a fellow Experience Architect at EffectiveUI, pitched me a link to Protoshare, a site for rapidly creating wireframes and collaborating on them with others. Even better, is that there’s interactivity, so people can see various interactions, rather than trying to describe them in text or over the phone. They have a tour on the site covering some of the features.

Other Options

There’s also Axure for wireframes, prototypes and spec creation. The bummer is that it’s PC only, however, there is a prebuilt library of design patterns you can use instead of having rethink the wheel. If someone tries this out, I’d love to hear their thoughts. Check out the tour.

iRise looks like it does a lot of the same stuff and is also a desktop application. There’s a bunch of different editions you can get depending on your needs. Check out the tour.

Adaptive Path put together a proof of concept for a new way of browsing the web as part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Browser Series. Adaptive Path gives a description of the project, called Aurora:

Aurora is a concept video exploring one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept series.

Being able to directly manipulate content in the browser, have a seamless browsing and collaboration experience, and the methods shown for organizing user content are definitely somethings worth shooting for. Granted I’m a guy who uses key commands or gestures wherever possible to avoid the Finder, drilling down to look for files, or using the mouse to access menu items.