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Sydney in September

3 comments

Published in Company News on 20 August 2008 by Philip Fierlinger

I’ll be over in Sydney in September running my rapid prototyping workshop as part of the Oz-IA conference. For people in the online business, the full conference program features a fantastic line up of topics and people covering design and usability issues. The other workshops look pretty choice, too.

As I’ve mentioned before, in my workshop I show several prototypes from the very early days of Xero and a few more recent ones. Rapid prototyping in Flash is essential to how we do things at Xero.

What?
Oz-IA design conference and workshops

When?
18-21 September

Where?
Sydney, Australia

How much does it cost?
That depends what you sign up for, but lucky for you I’ve been given a promo code PF0601 to get you a big fat discount.

See you there?

 

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3 comments

Greg Hart
21 August 2008 #

I notice you mentioned you do your prototyping in Flash, why not build your product in Flex?

Philip Fierlinger
21 August 2008 #

I put all my time and effort into the design, not building the prototype.

The prototypes we develop are relatively primitive, which is intentional.

They’re essentially slide shows that could ostensibly be created using any number of different tools.

For Xero, we don’t create interactive prototypes. All our prototypes are screenflows – slide shows showing a screen-by-screen, click-by-click simulation of somebody performing a set of tasks for a given use case.

The reason Flash is so ideal for the job is that it’s…

• a very flexible drawing tool
• a very flexible timeline editor
• it can easily be published and shared online

In my view, Flex is a tool for building an interface rather than designing a user experience.

Philip Fierlinger
21 August 2008 #

Sorry. I misread the question. I didn’t realise you asked why we don’t do the PRODUCT in Flex.

As I mentioned in the last comment, our prototypes are relatively primitive. So there’s no advantage to using the prototypes as a basis for development.

Apart from that, I think HTML is the best tool for the job of an online accounting system.

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