Reader Poll: What Tools Do You Use?

Jared Spool

By Jared Spool

November 12th, 2005

I’m curious. What tools do you use to get your job done?

If you’re involved in user experience work, what tools, if they vanished tomorrow, would you sorely miss? Do you use Visio? Morae? Word?

Take a moment. Ponder the tools you use. Pop us a comment below. We’d love to know.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 12th, 2005 at 7:31 am and is filed under Our Community, Resources, Usability Toolbox . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Reader Poll: What Tools Do You Use?”

  1. George Says:
    November 12th, 2005 at 9:05 am

    Dreamweaver for HTML prototyping and Visio for low-fi wireframes and site structure diagrams. Really powerful tools.

    I think I don’t even use pen and paper anymore. Prototyping with Dreamweaver happens so quick, that I can’t imagine I’ll ever have the time to make and test paper prototypes again.

  2. Bill Hart-Davidson Says:
    November 12th, 2005 at 10:20 am

    Results of a recent survey posted by Pedro Campos to the Interaction Design Association mailing list shed some interesting light on this issue.

    Among the findings – pencil and paper remain the most popular tools. So many affordances in those simple, familiar tools!

  3. Daniel J. Wilson Says:
    November 12th, 2005 at 2:29 pm

    For brainstorming and moderately detailed mockups, I really depend on Zengobi’s Curio. I find I can do a lot combining it with Photoshop and Acrobat.

  4. Enric Naval Says:
    November 12th, 2005 at 5:53 pm

    I use pencil and paper. Very useful because users can draw themselves a general guide of their desired layout, and I can re-draw it in another paper, and act as if I were clicking on the buttons. It allows me to clear many misunderstandings before even touching the computer.

  5. Daniel Szuc Says:
    November 12th, 2005 at 7:50 pm

    In no particular order and to name a few: Visio, Word, Excel, Dreamweaver, Post it notes (for affinity diagramming), white board, flip chart paper, index cards, morae and power point. The right activity with post its and plenty of wall space are particularly useful especially when looking at patterns or clusters of issues, information etc (physical space beats virtual space every time!)

  6. DeWayne Purdy Says:
    November 12th, 2005 at 9:46 pm

    Dreamweaver/Fireworks for design & prototypes, Omnigraffle for wireframes, Word. Morae would be nice, but don’t have it yet.

  7. Kyle Pero Says:
    November 13th, 2005 at 11:02 pm

    I Heavily use Visio, but wouldn’t miss it if it disappeared tomorrow (not exactly happy w/ the tool). Looking into doing more hand coded CSS prototypes. Homesite has always been my code editor of choice.

    I will use Acrobat a lot to create clickable PDFs for prototyping.

    Couldn’t live w/out Camtasia for user testing (remote and in-person tests)! I have held back on investing in Morae. I just can’t justify the cost yet.

    For project management I’m using Basecamp.

    All my presentations are done in PowerPoint and my reports are written in Word.

    When doing a competitive gap analysis or content inventory I use Excel.

  8. Dave Feldman Says:
    November 14th, 2005 at 8:48 am

    For static mockups and diagrams Photoshop, Illustrator, and to some extent InDesign (and occasionally OmniGraffle). For interactive HTML/PHP/XSLT mockups I add BBEdit, GoLive, and Firefox. For documentation and specifications, Word and InDesign. For graphics/look & feel work Photoshop, Ilustrator, and occasionally Cinema 4D. For mocking up non-Web apps (which I don’t get much call for these days), Apple Interface Builder combined with ShapeShifter if I want it to look like something other than a Mac.

  9. brandy Says:
    November 15th, 2005 at 2:54 pm

    For wireframes I use Visio. Powerpoint for presentations. Excel for user testing and lots of video equipment!

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