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FreshSpectrum Information Design

Unhide your work. Unhide your voice.

Prototype

Prototyping with InVision

This week on Thursday, August 31st at 10 AM EDT, I’ll be holding a webinar on prototyping.

This is part of a new series of free webinars I’ll be launching on Data Design Tools & Tactics Webinar Series.  Registration is limited to 50 (but I’ll be reserving an additional 50 spots exclusively for members of my diydatadesign workshop.

If you’re interested, register today.

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This webinar is part of Chris Lysy’s Beyond Excel Webinar Series. 

Before you can break out of your Microsoft Office comfort zone, you need to know what tools are worth your time.  Join Chris Lysy of Lysydesign.com as he walks you through a variety of useful data visualization design tools.

For this week’s session, Chris will be walking through InVision, a prototyping tool initially developed and marketed for use by front-end web designers.  But the web-based tool can also be incredibly useful to data designers.

Some of the relevant topics we’ll be discussing include:

  • Prototyping
  • Mood Board Development
  • Collaborative Design
  • Interactive Prototypes

A PDF Interactive Logic Model

Sure, interactive sounds neat. But we're not quite ready for the whole web thing.

So the interactive logic model post was a big hit.  I kept getting a similar question, so I decided to create a short follow-up.

Here goes…I used icons from thenounproject, sketched it all out in Adobe Illustrator, and created the interactive prototype using Invision.

But…

Interactivity can be accomplished a bajillion and one ways.  Some of those ways use free tools that make your information public.  Other ways keep everything away from the internet unless you decide to share.

There’s also lots of room between the two extremes.

Not in a position to share things on the internet?

Here is a PDF prototype that does the same thing.  I just broke my last prototype up into pages (could have started from scratch but this was quicker) and added a few in-document links.

This is just a prototype, a finished product would be much cleaner.  You can check it out here: PDF Interactive Logic Model

Screenshot of PDF logic model

Thoughts?

Try not to get wrapped up in the tool.  Design is more about process than it is about tools.  There are lots of ways to do this kind of thing.

I’m curious, are you publishing on the web or still in pdf mode?  Do you find this type of approach appealing?

Creating a hand drawn interactive dashboard for evaluation planning

It’s too bad we can’t create nice little interactive dashboards to support all of our work.  You know, as a way to kind of pull everything together and make our team’s (and client’s) lives just a little bit simpler.

Especially in those early planning days, where we see lots of little iterations.  Wouldn’t that be neat?

The Problem

So our first evaluation planning session was a success! We'll meet again in 6 months by which time you'll move on to other responsibilities and forget everything we've discussed here.

It’s always easier to fully engage a group when you can look them in the eyes.  Unfortunately, that’s not always an option.  Most of the time the best you can do is an in-person meeting or retreat every once in awhile with email/phone tag in between.

The challenge is in keeping the momentum moving forward between live sessions without putting all the work on the shoulders of a smaller subset of people.  Or worse, letting any progress fade away until the next time you meet in person.

The Concept

If we can make engagement in the planning process as simple as possible, more people will remain engaged.

By using a prototyping tool, we can quickly create interactive dashboards out of any image or set of images, including hand drawn.  This means we can quickly change out our dashboard interface at a moments notice, changing the emphasis or focus based on the task at hand.

You could even have different stakeholders draw out their ideal dashboard, then quickly bring their ideal to life.

By focusing on encouraging the development of visual artifacts by stakeholders, interactive environments can be quickly stitched together.  Since the tools are specifically designed for iterative development they are easy to alter and also comment-mode ready.

The Prototype

Here is a link to the live prototype.  Click around a little at the top of the page, see where it takes you.

I’m using this to show how the hand drawn dashboard would work during the evaluation planning process.  But there are lots of opportunities to use this approach.

Hand Drawn Interactive Dashboard Link

Thoughts?

What do you think?  Leave me a reply and let me know.

Have a project that could use a little simple easy to implement hand drawn organization?  Let’s talk.