The Speech Bubble User Flow by Barnabas, is a hybrid representation that combines a sitemap, persona and user flow all into one. The idea starts off by overlaying simple and short comments made by a persona in the form speech bubbles on top of a structured sitemap. More so, the speech bubbles are ordered chronologically and so flow through one by one. In the built Axure Demo that has been generated, the sitemap pages are also linked to the wireframes which makes it easier to switch from the generic to the specific. Barnabas has been exploring Personas that “could talk” in a few other forms as well, as the Complex Speech Bubble Persona and the Commented Sitemaps show.

My take on this deliverable would be that Personas can sometimes get lost once a project builds momentum. Possibly what Barnabas is doing is helping the Persona to live a little bit longer and inspire the team a bit more as the Persona’s comments pop up throughout the project. One thing I do wonder about is how this would work though if there was a second or third scenario for the same user type, as sometimes I feel that interactive projects are composed of many little separate user stories and not just one. Either way, good stuff and thanks for sharing!

If you would like to tweak the deliverable, the author has been kind enough to share the actual source Axure file as a downloadable template.

Credits: Barnabas Nagy

From the maker of Keynotopia, now comes Axutopia. This is a wide collection of Axure widgets and icons that can be used for prototyping, wireframing and UI design purposes. The whole thing can be purchased as a bundle, or libraries are also broken up individually. Sets are available to style: iPhones, iPads, Windows 7, Mac OSX, Web 2.0, Facebook, Blackberries, Android, and Windows Phones. Here are the details:

• 3,000+ Axure widgets
• 100% Royalty-free icons
• Fully editable text labels
• Pixel-perfect PNG groups
• Preserved corners with transparency
• Comes in .rp and .rplib formats

Credits: Amir Khella

In addition to the 750 Vector Icons for Web Designers, Vincent has also released 930 Vintage Vector Ornaments as set. The set comes in both EPS and AI files and is filled with ornaments, borders, corners, rulers and flourishes. :) Possibly useful for some projects? The bundle comes at a price of $39. Enjoy.

Credits: Vincent Le Moign

Hannah just started the Fireworks Wireframing Kit resource site. It’s still hot of the press, but the blog is gearing up to be a collection of freely submitted PNG files submitted by the public to help with wireframing. So far there are a few grey scale files already with such components as: modal windows, login boxes, and buttons of various shapes and sizes. Right now you have to download each component individually, as you see fit. Hopefully it’s useful and please feel free to submit something if you have stuff to share.

Credits: Hannah Milan

PJ recently took another stab at making gesture icons more comprehensible and released Cue under Creative Commons. It’s a proposed system for representing gestures more clearly that makes use of thumb like icons. He explains his motivation for the project in a blog post as well. The icons come in PNG (4 sizes), SVG, Omnigraffle and InDesign formats. Awesome. It’s always great to see explorations in visual language. Thanks PJ!

Here is how he puts it:

These gesture icons act as roadsigns to an app for interaction way-finding. As expected, there has been a significant collection of gesture icon sets that have been made available to fill this need. The current crop of icons succeed in clarity, but they lack the iconic qualities necessary to act as a standard representation of gestures. My goal is to help create a foundational set of icons that are flexible, clear and distilled to a point where they could become a standard visual system to build from – ultimately to be used within apps for when explicit communication is needed.

Credits: PJ Onori

The guys over at WitFlow recently put together an Axure Cheat Sheet (PDF). It comes loaded with a bunch of potentially useful little shortcuts for the Axure masters out there (or shall I say, Axure FU Masters to be). Thanks for compiling & sharing this. :)

Credits: @WitFlow

Here comes another mobile template for Fireworks for mocking up Blackberry screens. It has been released publicly sometime a month ago by UNITiD – a small company from the Netherlands. Enjoy if it’s useful.

In their own words:

For all interaction designers who will be designing apps for the BlackBerry platform, we’d like to share our Fireworks template. The template is made for BlackBerry devices with resolution 640×480 but as all UI elements are vector images they can easily be resized.

Credits: UNITiD

A persona template has just been shared by the folks over at Orange Bus. Perhaps what might be interesting about this particular one is that it invites quick and dirty hand drawing or writing. A lot of the other personas out there, from what I’ve seen in the past, look pretty well polished. This one on the other hand is a lot more doodle compatible. It comes with fill in the blank spaces for basic naming, portrait, a back story, motivations, frustrations, their ideal experience, and a summary quote. Nice!

Credits: Joanne Richardson

Adding this iPad Omnigraffle Stencil to the list for all those MAC users out there (thanks Ivana for finding it). The set looks pretty decent with a great deal of popovers, buttons, bars, icons, keyboards, alerts, and so on. As an added bonus the set also comes with a few blank and printable PDF sketchsheets – handy for all those times when you don’t feel like drawing out hundreds of screen outlines over and over again. Enjoy.

Credits: ZURB

The gesture library from gestureworks has been recently expanded to contain a total of 200 illustrations. The library now contains multi-touch as well as stroke gestures in a variety of bitmap and scalable formats. It’s loaded with swipes, drags, flicks, holds, scrolls, taps, and even 3D gestures. For showing stroke direction, they’ve come up with an interesting way of starting off each stroke with a blue circle and ending with a red one. Pretty cool and inspirational ways of showing off user actions.

Credits: gestureworks