UX & IA Design Thinking

I have been thinking about posting a Axure 9 UI review for a while now. In this video I explore some of the differences between the two versions of the Prototyping tool. Overall most of the core features are the same such as creating shapes, text blocks, and formatting. In Axure 9 they have allowed you to personalize the location and size of your tool panes. They have also changed around the interactions panel to be more streamline and not take up as much space. All of this takes a little bit of time to get use to but once you start working with it for some time it will become second nature. Check out the video below, I hope to create more videos around additional features within Axure 9.

I created a post about a year ago about Using Visio for SharePoint Wireframes . So now that 2010 has been released I got busy building the next generation Visio Wireframe Toolkit for SharePoint 2010. It is currently around ~40 pages that range from Wiki, team site, meeting workspaces, search, my sites, and application pages. All the text, navigation, web parts, and images are editable and can be added, moved, edited or deleted. In this version I made sure that the correct colors, fonts, and web part placements were true to the application. On most of the templates I have included some basic information about the page layout, web parts on the page, and libraries/lists included. Here are some samples: Team Site Contacts Web Database My Profile Silverlight Organization Viewer I wish I could share it with everyone but my hands are tied and I cannot. It is an EMC Consulting artifact and I am writing this blog post to mainly get the word out that Visio is st...

Click to watch the video presentation (36MB WMV), thanks to my friend Paul Galvin for taking the video. Update: For some reason the link was not good. I have updated it and it should work now.

I want to thank everyone for attending my presentation. It was a great success! I had a co-worker video record the session but it will take a little while to get that uploaded/edited for the masses. Here is the link to my presentation. I have included notes on each slide for the dialog. Download: http://cid-ed1a37150dabcd2d.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/IA%20and%20Branding%20Process%7C_ErikSwenson.pptx?ccr=80 Thanks again, enjoy and please add your comments to this post!

I started out my career creating custom forms, stationary, and illustrations/diagrams for a book publishing company. You can see my old illustration art here: http://www.noreastdesign.com/erik/ *Keep in mind this was last modified back in 2004, so the resume is way out dated...* Back in 2004 I was working exclusively on a MAC. So when clients (Book Authors) sent us Visio files, we would cringe because all we saw was very rough boxes and squares. As my career changed to consulting, and my PowerBook laptop turned into a Dell Latitude, I started looking at Visio a little closer. After being  given a task to take screenshots and re-draw all SPS 2003 default pages and admin screens in Visio(~70 screens) I started seeing that this application could really be more than boxes and squares. So I put down my Illustrator, Freehand, and other vector programs and really dove deep into what Visio had to offer. I found it actually really easy to create great looking wireframes. Exampl...