Wireframing Tools for Fun and Profit

Wireframing provides us a powerful tool that allows us to pre-conceptualize our design ideas and eventually make them rock solid. Often coming up with a crude version of the solution first gives us a lot of valuable information and helps us to come up with better results.

At the simplest level you require just a pen, a piece of paper and a bit of imagination. Fortunately there are some more high-tech yet still quite light tools available that offer some nice benefits. In this post I'm going to discuss some of these tools in more detail.

Besides "pen and paper" I'm going to cover iMockups, Balsamiq and FlairBuilder. iMockups is available only for iPad while the latter two are meant to be used on your desktop computer. I'll also discuss some other alternatives briefly.

Why - The Ultimate Question

It's a good idea to simply ask "why?" when you get stuck with some problem. This simple yet revelatory question may lead surprisingly good results, especially after applied a few times in a row. This technique is also know as "The Five Whys". Even though it has been named that way, the amount of "whys" can be totally arbitrary.

Interestingly this technique was originally developed by the folks behind Kanban at Toyota Motor Corporation. This kind of root cause analysis can give nice insight to processes and the way they work so I guess it's not that surprising.

The Wikipedia article about the subject highlights a few possible problems with this method. First of all it is possible to stop asking too soon. Instead of fixing the actual cause of the problem you may end up alleviating its symptoms while leaving the actual problem intact.

Sometimes you simply might not know the right answer or you might get different answers altogether depending on where you get them from. It is also mentioned you might end up revealing just one issue of many.

How to deal with these problems in practice? Given the possibility that you might get multiple answers for each "why", perhaps it makes sense to treat the method in a tree-like manner. Instead of just going through one set of whys, you might want to expand as needed based on your answers. This should help particularly with the last problem mentioned.

"The Five Whys" is a simple yet powerful method to apply in many contexts. If you've got a problem, explore it with whys. At least this should give you some more insight to the subject and hopefully the solution. It's kind of a trivial idea but still one worth keeping in mind.

Pretotyping - From Ideas to Reality

Anyone can come up with ideas. It's the selected few that can make them become reality. This is the difference between ideas and innovators. This is also one of the core points of Patrick Copeland's QCon keynote, "Innovation at Google".

Not every idea is worth developing into a full-blown product. How then do you identify which ones are? This is where pretotyping comes in. It is important not to mix it up with prototyping. According to Copeland, these two concepts operate on different level. Pretotyping is all about coming up with a testable version of idea with minimal cost and effort. Prototyping aims to produce something way more concrete.

This means your pretotype might just be a piece of paper or a block of wood. It is supposed to resemble the real thing enough so you can interact with it in a primitive manner. Instead of having the computer to perform the logic, you might handle that yourself or get a buddy to do that for you and act as an "oracle" of some sort. Whatever you can come up with at minimal cost works as long as it's enough to illustrate the concept!

Once you've got your pretotype up and "running" you might want to use it for a while to see whether or not it really works. Some ideas seem great initially but then fizzle as you get bored with them. It's better to get bored with a pretotype than something more concrete. In the best case you end up wanting to implement the idea because it's proven to work on basic level.

What's the point of all of this? Pretotyping allows us to shuffle through a significant amount of ideas till we find the one that works or at least seems to. I don't believe it's a silver bullet. There are no such things in our industry. It does seem like a viable way to come up with new concepts for products in a lean manner.

Pretotyping moves the focus of development to the right place. We're better off building the right things "wrong" rather than building the wrong things "right". Ideally we should be able combine a proven, top-notch idea with a stellar implementation.

If any of this rang a bell, check out the presentation and the free book that's available. I have to admit coming upon this concept changed the way I see things quite a bit in a positive manner!

Places to Visit in Western Sicily

I did a little holiday trip on western Sicily around a week ago or so. The weather was just perfect (around +27C for the week) and there were plenty of nice places to see. I thought it might be a nice to write a post about this experience.

Compared to Garda region, which I've visited before, western Sicily was quite different. You could say it's less "touristy". This doesn't have to be a bad thing, though. There's definitely a lot to see around there. Too much to see just in a week.

In this post I'll cover some highlights of my trip and provide some pointers for people interested in the region. I'm definitely not an expert on the subject. Despite this I hope to give you little insight on the subject should you decide to travel there.