Wireframing in Fireworks CS4 1
Last week, I attended a presentation by Bill Abel at the June meeting of the Birmingham UX Group hosted at the Innovation Depot.
The topic was “Communicating Design”. His presentation was filled, and I mean filled, with wireframe examples and various types of charts and planned activities to evolve your users’ experiences within your website, application, etc. It was great to see how others dive into the same issues we face every day.
After the presentation there was a question about what software was being used by the group to develop wireframes. Most said OmniGraffle. Some were using InDesign, Photoshop and others. Recently (literally a couple of days before the presentation) I started using Fireworks for prototyping. At this point, I wasn’t comfortable enough with it to recommend it to the group simply because of some problems I was having getting printable versions of my wireframes.
Today is a new day. I was browsing through the July/August issue of Layers magazine, which ironically has a major focus on Fireworks CS4 (free beta download), and I noticed the cover article titled “Fireworks CS4 Beta for Web Design”. Not expecting to learn much, but optimistic, I read it anyway. As I read more I noticed it was driving more toward Fireworks as a prototyping tool. The inclusion of the “Common Library” window (contains various RIA and HTML buttons, etc.) and the ability to set “Master Pages” within your layout (from which your other pages derive their layout) are a huge help to the wireframe process. This drastically speeds the process of making layout and main navigation changes to multiple pages. The next part was the revelation for which I was hoping. The Holy Grail of printed prototypes; the Export to PDF option! Yes, it actually works as expected and exports all of your wireframes, in order, to a PDF file. It also mentions being an “interactive” PDF. I got so excited to share this news that I haven’t dug into the “interactive” part of the PDF, but I would assume it links between pages or something like that. If you read this and have any experience with this “interactive” feature, please post it in the comments. I will be looking into it over the next few days.
Along with the PDF export there are also a few other options for delivering your content over the Web: HTML and Images and CSS and Images. These also work as expected. Great features!
Until then, happy prototyping!
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