Apple Numbers - More than a spreadsheet
Author: Thomas Gonzalez
For any designers or UX people out there, I don't know about you, but I have yet to find a wire-framing tool/software that beats a whiteboard or sketch-pad, but I think I have found something that comes pretty close.
Making wireframes is an essential part of the design process (at least for me) that allows me to quickly brainstorm layouts and different configurations for an overall application or dashboard UI. Most illustration tools that I am familar with (like Illustrator or Flash Pro) are just too cumbersome and have way too many settings/details that are completely irrelevant to the wireframing process. Tools like Visio (which I just can't stand) and SmartDraw come a little closer, but they have all sorts of awkward UI issues that at best, slow down the creative process and in some cases completely hinder it due to the way they expect you to create content.
Well, after many years, I think I have found a very good tool to make my wire frames in, and ironically the software was never explicitly designed to make drawings. What I am referring to is Apple's Numbers - the supposed Excel replacement. Well, as a replacement for Excel it doesn't even come close - for doing any type of semi-sophisticated numeric modeling it just doesn't cut it.
But, as a very easy to use, quick and easy, creative wireframe tool it is superb. It has all the basic shapes I could ask for, sans all the detailed property controls that make things tedious in most other tools. The inspector panel allows me to create sophisticated gradients, fills, strokes and best of all, it has auto-align/snapping capabilities built right into its WYSIWYG interface. Most of my wire-frames are some form of nested rectangles, and this tool just lends itself to the task beautifully. Because of the way they designed numbers, it is a layout tool first, and and a spreadsheet second. So you don't even need to have a worksheet at all, you can just have a blank canvas and start dropping images, shapes, text, etc. Add the fact that you have an automatic export to PDF and it makes it ideal for delivering to clients and end-users.
For me it has been very liberating, and one of the first times I felt a software tool actually accelerated my productivity for doing this type of work, versus just being a tedious step I needed to do to translate my whiteboard/paper sketches.
Anyone running on OS X and doing any type of wire-framing work should give it a try, I would be curious what other designers think.
Thomas,
I work for SmartDraw and I came across your post via Google Alerts.
I'd like to have a better understanding of how SmartDraw's interface made your tasks more difficult, so if you don't mind me asking, what were you trying to do with SmartDraw and how did our program's interface get in your way?
A bit a background behind our interface: we design our products so that anyone, regardless of technical expertise, can get up and running as quickly as possible. Our template-driven model is essential to this - it guides users down an automated path and eliminates a lot of the guesswork for them (spacing, centering, relationships between nodes, etc...) We designed the UI this way based off of extensive user testing and observation; however, we're constantly working on refining it.
A lot of folks who are more technical actually find our approach to be somewhat frustrating because they feel that they're denied a certain degree of flexibility due to the templates and other aspects of the automated drawing. That's understandable - technical folks want and need more flexibility.
We always try to strike a compromise between technical users and nontechnical users though (we try to make both of them as happy as possible,) so if you'd be willing to give me some feedback about what we can do to make your experience with SmartDraw more productive we'd really appreciate it.
If you'd like to send me feedback via email you can reach me at the address below:
astannard AT smartdraw DOT com
Thanks in advance,
Aaron
Hi Aaron,
Thank you for taking the time to write and comment on the post, much appreciated. What you described is the EXACT frustration I found with SmartDraw. While I found it to be immensely better designed and easier to use than visio, it was those automated constraints that drove me crazy.
As a designer AND an engineer, I sometimes want to tweak little layout details. My one memory of smart draw was trying to create some text in a tab on top of a rectangle, and each time I lined up the text (vertically/horizontally) to get it the way I wanted it to look, it would shift out of alignment the next time I sized or moved the component.
The end result was that my final wire-frame or mockup ended up bugging me so much because all of these tabs/labels had text mis-aligned.
The one suggestion I might make, would be able to toggle the component, or sheet, out of the "automated-constraint" mode and give people the ability to dial things in to their liking and then "lock" the component again so that automation picked up.
All that said, I only spent an hour or two with the tool (after I purchased it) before I moved on to something else, and I was never motivated enough to come back and figure out if I could make it work.
With Numbers, it was all SOO easy, I was up and running in 5 minutes and never looked back. Not to say that it doesn't have shortcomings, but for my purposes it solves 90% of my use cases.
- Tom
Thanks for answering my questions! Much appreciated. I'll make sure that I get this into the hands of our user experience manager (my guess is that he comes across this suggestion for SmartDraw on the UX forums that he frequents, like Boxes and Arrows.)
Also, best of luck with your MAX presentation!
Have you tried OmniGraffle for wireframes? I use it for all of my design documentation work.