PowerMockup is a simple UI design plugin for Microsoft PowerPoint that makes it easy to create low fidelity wireframes. Perhaps one of its core strengths is that it has a low barrier to entry, since many people out there already have access to PowerPoint. The plugin speeds up the design process by letting users insert fully editable UI elements (containers, navigation items, icons, and text elements) onto the canvas.

The merits of PowerPoint as a prototyping tool have been discussed in the past and are definitely worth to consider. For one, PowerPoint supports basic interactivity and nonlinear page linking. Personally however, I still like to think of a the page-by-page linear narrative nature of PowerPoint as an equally strong alternative presentation style to interactive prototypes. With a defined beginning and an end, a PowerPoint deck ensures that viewers don’t have to discover interactivity, but instead can be guided across flows.

Would I personally use this tool as an interaction/interface designer? I’m not sure. I’ve come to love Illustrator, endless canvases, and free-form electronic sketching as a technique. So moving away from that style of working would require something more than a set of pre-canned elements. I’d still recommend it to others on a more multidisciplinary team – especially if there were people with less of a design background, but still a desire to express their ideas quickly.

Overall, a great little product. Thanks Andreas!

Credits: Andreas Wulf

I’ve been thinking about ways to communicate how a user interface scales over time as the amount of information it needs to support varies. For example, sometimes the UI has to support multiple cases ranging from no results, to just a few results, to thousands of results. A good interface designer would probably think this through and come up with a UI that fulfills all of the relevant cases. For this, I began exploring a couple of visual language ideas to help myself and others who would like to tackle UI scaling. Here are some open and experimental thoughts:

A) Scale Marks. These are just floating reminder notes alongside a screen with a range of information that ought to be supported. Sometimes it’s easy to forget (or not know) how much data a UI really needs to support and these could be used as small self-targeted tests of sorts.

B) Scale Sets. This is a grouping of all the multiple UI states for those times when we actually want to draw out all of the relevant state ranges.

C) Spatial Scales. When there is more information, perhaps we might wish to communicate a maximum size of an element (max width / max height).

These are just a couple of thoughts which some day I might bring into the next release of the ISN. If you have other ideas, please share. :) Hope it’s useful.

Credits: Jakub Linowski