In the dark room of design interaction

In the dark room of design interaction

To create the real impression of a 'working prototype'(to capture the workable structure and relevance of information on a screen or page) I heavily depend on Visio. To my mind itz a jack of all trades and a master of none :) bcoz I see a real problem of interactivity with Visio. Often I had to show up my screens interactively either via live-conferencing or live on my networked desktop.Which is a lacking feature in visio.

So I was searching for some kind of tool which could provide me with the rich possibility of creating interactive wireframes intuitively. I tested couple of softwares available in stencils design space. some how fell in love with Axure RP Pro due to its capability, as it lets me do all kind of DHTM-related-tricks to simulate AJAX kind of stuff. But still, at the end of a day each tool has its own uniqueness in delivering perfect solution. Not but the least there're vector graphic tools & markup editors to do the magic which're less considered for this kinda work.

I also tested ConceptDraw & SmartDraw but somehow the combination of stpBA+Visio 03 Stenicils seems to be a perfect blend of wireframe creation & GUI storyboarding. I like visio's ability to create wireframes easily but miss the possibility of adding interactive funcionality to it (i.e lack of sequence of user interactions). To resolve this issue there's a nice way of handling deliverable in a order in which the wireframes appear in a website or application in sequence(which helps to keep the user engaged & informed about the flow). Its' called swipr, a toolset allows Information Architects to create an integrated and interactive deliverable from standard Visio files. Which is yet to be released as a free toolset.

Btw, I encountered a interesting trick which makes a life of prototyper more comfortable. It's about hand-drawing prototypes on a tablet computer or on pen tablet.