Written by Alan Musselman
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
Where do you work and what keeps you busy?
I am the User Experience Director at UE Architects, Inc. in San Francisco’s South Park. We design web sites, mobile apps and platforms. Our services range from user experience strategy – defining product features to match user needs – to interface and interaction design, and branding. We’ve been using Fireworks since 1998, and designing for the web since 1995 and mobile since 2000. We’re busy designing wireframes and interactive prototypes with Fireworks so the system can be experienced early and often.
What type of project are we showcasing today where Adobe Fireworks was used in the process?
We are currently using Fireworks to design mobile apps. The latest project to be released is a social networking app for the Palm Pre – one of the first 18 included in last week’s launch. Designing for the Palm’s WebOS is incredibly easy utilizing our template of symbols and UI conventions.
But we’ll showcase another project that already has a case study: Yahoo Tech. See our case study. Yahoo Tech is essentially CNET for the non-techie – where you could send your mom to figure out which camera to buy. We used Fireworks to design all the wireframes and interactive prototypes used in usability testing. The wireframes (interface design without hi-fi visual design) are very detailed, clearly illustrating key interactions. Fireworks enabled tight collaboration with our user experience designers to quickly iterate on this large site. This site was innovative for Yahoo as it was one of the first Yahoo sites to use dynamic, AJAX, in-page interactions.
Are there features in Adobe Fireworks that saved you time and money?
I love Fireworks because it’s incredibly fast. I’ve been a Fireworks evangelist for years, slowly converting Photoshop users as they finally realize how much faster and more intuitive FW is. It’s so fast that I’m often updating designs while I’m still on a conference call with clients, and can immediately show them new directions on our extranet.
Fireworks has been designed with interface designer’s project workflows in mind. And CS4 is getting even better (except for the lingering bugs). The greatest time savers are symbols, styles, navigating through pages, and easy prototyping and exporting. Using symbols has been especially helpful for mobile interface design. And fast linking and exporting turn wireframes into truly interactive prototypes in just minutes. Often clients think their site or app is done when they first use a prototype – it’s very effective. So, all this saves time – which is money, and better yet, enables us to design better products. We learn so much from interacting with prototypes and observing how real users use it.
What current web related technologies are most favored when designing and developing for the web?
We ONLY use Fireworks to design interface wireframes. Some of our designers still use Photoshop for visual design, but many have converted to Fireworks. With Fireworks’ new text engine and tighter integration with other Adobe products, producing assets in Fireworks should be as good as Photoshop (text wasn’t as good as Photoshop in the past).
Our primary focus is in user experience strategy and design. So, we define the product’s features and how it works, and the interfaces. We work with our tech partners for development. Still, we are very active in development, especially as web sites are behaving more like applications. Our prototypes usually direct development, so we don’t get lost in technologies.
Do you remember your “Aha” moment you had experienced when first opening up Adobe Fireworks?
1998. Fireworks just seemed so much more tangible, intuitive and faster than Photoshop. I was sold immediately and never looked back. It seemed that finally there was a tool made for the job as opposed to hacking through Photoshop in the mid 90s. It was so nice to be able to draw in vectors for bitmap output, grab anything without having to navigate layers, and iterate on designs so much faster. This enables us to iterate much more = better designs.
Are you involved with any communities on the web?
iXDA, BayCHI, LinkedIn, Facebook, Meetup, Twitter and some lists with other user experience designers. I use a lot of social networks since we’ve been designing social networks and collaborative sites for the past 10 years.
Do you have a place on the web you call home? Where can we find you?
I’m also a travel photographer, published in Lonely Planet and National Geographic.
Photo site: http://CinemaScope.com
