Austin recently came up with a sitemap or site architecture OmniGraffle stencil that makes room for some extra description. In the stencil, beside each page title there is now a little space for an explanation of what the page is about. He shared the downloadable stencil which can be obtained right from his site. Awesome. Thanks!

In his own words:

I’ve used EightShapes’s brilliant Unify deliverable system for about four years. It’s excellent.

Out of the box, Unify is designed for use with Adobe InDesign. Lately, however, I’ve been site mapping in sweet, luscious OmniGraffle, and I created a Unify-inspired OmniGraffle stencil for making site maps.

But, there’s one problem with lots of site maps.

In your typical site map, you show the page’s title adjacent to the little box for that page. Unfortunately, clients and developers and designers don’t always know what kind of page the page will be. In other words, if you have a page titled, “Orders”, it’s not clear if that’s a dashboard, a list of orders, or even a form form for adding an order.

So I added a line for every page on the site map where you can offer a very brief description of the page.

Credits: Austin Govella

A rather interesting experimental wizard of oz sketching tool has been developed a few years ago by a group at the University of Washington. The setup requires two separate monitors with the user on one and the designer on another. The person evaluating the prototype can then use a standard computer or a pen based input to perform actions on one monitor. While the screen pauses on the user’s monitor, the designer (acting as the wizard) then spontaneously draws up or selects what the user will see as a consequence, and so on.

Today’s popular prototyping tools for the most part rely on a similar approach to handling interactivity, which might be a bit stale. There is a large focus on trying to predict all possible interactions in advance and prerecording event handlers (such as onclicks and mouseovers) ahead of time. I find SketchWizard on the other hand provides a more spontaneous way of playing out interactions with a prototype. While it alleviates the need to have everything thought out before hand, the one catch might be that the user has to occasionally wait a few seconds longer before a new screen comes into view (as the designer is preparing it quietly on the other end). Perhaps it would be interesting to see more prototyping tools take on this approach as well.

There are binary releases and videos available right there on the project page.

Credits: Richard C. Davis, T. Scott Saponas, James A. Landay