Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

For the past year our team of user experience designers has worked to find the best way to record and present our design strategy.  We, like many other interactive teams, use Visio to create site maps and wireframes.  Lately, we've delved into other tools for more interactive prototypes, but Visio still has its place in our reliable toolbox.  Anyone who's used Visio knows that it wasn't designed specifically for this purpose and our UX colleagues have provided several add-ons and enhancements to make it work better.  We've collected some of these, pulled them together, and made our own additions; now we have a consolidated template for our Visio diagrams.  We call it the Capstrat Diagramming Suite.

Here's a list of features for you.  We'll post a handful of articles over the next few weeks explaining how to use some of the key features.

• Templates for site maps and wireframes
• Extensive set of shapes, including common interactive widgets
• Annotation tacks for different audiences/purposes including development, design, copywriting and questions
• Ability to show/hide annotation tacks by type
• Ability to generate reports in Word with the annotations for easy printing
• Copy and paste remembering the X and Y position of elements for quick duplication of pages
• Ability to copy an entire page

That's just the short list.  If you're interested in giving it a try, you'll need Visio 2003 or 2007, but watch out if you're using both.  2007 makes some changes to the macros when it saves the file, so you'll have to do some spelunking into the Visual Basic settings to get it to work with 2003 again.  Let me know if you run into that problem and I'll lend a hand.

Download

ZIP File (0.98 MB)

Credits

Welie's Visio Macros, Martijn van Welie

Export to Word and Excel

Export All Pages as JPG, Chris Roth

Annotation Tack, Dan Brown

GUUI Prototyping Tool