While I had this on my screen yesterday, the reactions of people walking past ranged from chuckling (“Is that for real?”) to asking enthusiastically if I had a copy to lend out. I’m not going to write my opinion here, since I haven’t read the book, but I’ll say one thing: there’s clearly a trade off between choosing a tool because it suits your team’s skill set – and choosing a tool because it enhances your design process or quality in other ways. The balance of this trade off is going to vary depending on your organisation. In other words, different strokes for different folks.
Harry,
We’ve recently started using Axure RP to prototype all our websites. Wondered if you’d used it or had any opinions?
I’ve been using Axure for the past year or so on and off. It’s OK if you acknowledge its limitations and don’t try to stretch it. A few web apps have been popping up recently that have similar functionality, e.g. Protoshare…
Yeah, I looked a t Protoshare but it didn’t look quite as good. Might give it another go.
I haven’t looked at the book, and you may already know this, but I think this isn’t really so weird… It’s a follow-up book to Arnowitz’s previous one, kind of in the pattern of computer science books that have a follow-up edition “with C++” for examples, or stats books with examples in Excel or whatever.
And Excel really is surprisingly versatile… not that it’s necessarily best for prototyping but there’s probably a low barrier for people who already use it.
When I were a lad, we used to do wireframing in wool using a loom. You might not have thought it were the right tool for the job, but really, the thought that went into those things was phenomenal. And you ended up with a nice rug afterwards.