Sketch Flow - a little practical use.
After watching various presentations and reading an interview, I decided to try to apply Sketch Flow to a small new project.
For reference: Sketch Flow is a piece of Expression Blend 3 used to prototype user interfaces. About him already a little told on Habré ( 1 , 2 ). Personally, I liked his presentation on MIX'09 (about an hour of video, English).
The project is very small - literally a website of a dozen pages. But everything is complicated by the fact that the client - and this is our old, well-known client - is a very demanding client. If you just draw the design according to the TZ, then you would most likely have to redo it three or four times. And then just the designer is busy. So I decided to sketch a draft of the interface in Sketch Flow.
Unfortunately, there is no time for a big post with pictures, so I’ll go straight to the point. Looks like conceived succeeded. In just two iterations, we managed to satisfy the client’s manager, and we’ve begun to convince the director. He, of course, began to move the blocks back and forth, but with us this is only a sketch. So it's easy to move. I can imagine how we would strain to move these blocks already in the draft of the design. Three times (while three).
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Pros:
There are a lot of cons:
Finally, I will tell you how I solved the issue of scrolling. Since the sketch is a common silverlight application, each page has a class there. I just hanged myself on the OnLoad event and there I wrapped the whole page in another ScrollViewer of the size I needed. Works.
The only problem with this approach is that the marks that the client can make on top of the sketch are not scrolled. So a standard scroller is a must.
For reference: Sketch Flow is a piece of Expression Blend 3 used to prototype user interfaces. About him already a little told on Habré ( 1 , 2 ). Personally, I liked his presentation on MIX'09 (about an hour of video, English).
The project is very small - literally a website of a dozen pages. But everything is complicated by the fact that the client - and this is our old, well-known client - is a very demanding client. If you just draw the design according to the TZ, then you would most likely have to redo it three or four times. And then just the designer is busy. So I decided to sketch a draft of the interface in Sketch Flow.
Unfortunately, there is no time for a big post with pictures, so I’ll go straight to the point. Looks like conceived succeeded. In just two iterations, we managed to satisfy the client’s manager, and we’ve begun to convince the director. He, of course, began to move the blocks back and forth, but with us this is only a sketch. So it's easy to move. I can imagine how we would strain to move these blocks already in the draft of the design. Three times (while three).
')
Pros:
- The special style of the buttons and “kurolapiy” font immediately makes the client understand that this is not a design at all, and that it is not necessary to find fault with the design. And you need to watch how he wants to arrange the blocks and buttons.
- You can export the draft to the silverlight application, place it on the site and give the link to the client.
- You can export everything to the Word. It turned out to be even more convenient for them.
- You can switch from ekspreshena to the studio and write code for the draft there. Pretty comfortable.
There are a lot of cons:
- The editor is pretty avid.
It is not by chance that they call it Sketch Flow Preview.(For some reason I decided that it is a preview) - The sketch for WPF and for Silverlight offers radically different controls. Not sure what is good. This is understandable from the point of view of the logic of the product (see the presentation), but not very convenient.
- When I publish a draft on the web, it is somehow awfully cached. Therefore, it is normal to show all this to the client only once. The second time he will have to clean the cache. This is a big problem.
- The product is sharpened under the usual 4: 3 interfaces, and not under the web page. Pages are often long and need to be scrolled. A player for the draft does not know how. He can only increase / decrease, which is not intuitive for the client.
- Export to the Word is also buggy in some places.
Finally, I will tell you how I solved the issue of scrolling. Since the sketch is a common silverlight application, each page has a class there. I just hanged myself on the OnLoad event and there I wrapped the whole page in another ScrollViewer of the size I needed. Works.
The only problem with this approach is that the marks that the client can make on top of the sketch are not scrolled. So a standard scroller is a must.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/76263/
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