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In short, no.
We use Balsamiq, maaaaybe photoshop now that we have a colleague who makes goodlooking mocks within a reasonable timeframe (hour tops), and that's it.
I sometimes jot down concepts by hand on paper or board, then take a quick picture to upload to knowledge base if its worth it. Everything else just takes too much time, specially if clients change their minds.
But then, maybe other companies, other projects, work differently..? -
@wgroenewold Quicker? We're talking high fidelity mockups, not just quick drawings we can do on the fly, so everything needs to be properly drawn, sized and placed. That's the reason I'm complaining, doing it in Balsamiq is so much faster, at least for me
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On a manufacturing floor, it's easier to get feedback on printed out designs rather than digital mockups. I've sketched out, on paper, a UI with a stakeholder before. It was loud, so I relied on gestures to get the interactivity communicated. Sometimes subject matter experts are shit at computers. I think it's cool of your teacher to require some kind of proof that you can explain how the user will experience the interface.
The video thing does seem tedious, though.
Edit: sketches are reasonable. Precision-drafted? Maybe not so much. -
Doodles of screens and with arrows drawn all over them to show journeys - yes.
Interactive Mock ups, no. Once you have an idea of what you want it to look like with the doodles I've always made a digital version or prototyped it up in code, dependent how much work either is.
(one real world piece of advice on UI, non techies can't grasp designs that are not 100% perfect. So if you ever need to do a design on photoshop or whatever to show some Sales people, remember to make it look as spot on as possible or they'll just go on about how "the button shouldn't be that shade of blue" - hope that helps in the future!) -
@AnonymousGuy Thanks for the advice. I've actually been looking for a way to ask some noob questions about the life of a software engineer but I don't know if devrant is the place to do so. I wish there was some kind of "Help" or "Noobs" section. I don't want to bother everyone else, this is supposed to be about rants.
!Rant
I GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE TODAY WITH MY DEGREE IN COMPUTER SCIENCE!
Now to find a job :D
TL;DR: Have you ever been on a serious company where you have to DRAW a high fidelity mockup of the software in the design phase?
So I'm in my last year of college and I have a class called Interactive systems design, which is basically about usability and how to design the frontend of your app so it's intuitive, pretty and easy to use.
So we work in groups to design a project for the entire semester, following a long and tedious process of research and planning which includes writing absurdly long documents, doing interviews with potential users and more.
Now that we've done all of that, the teacher insists that we make paper mockups of our app before we do a digital one using Balsamiq or other programs. He wants the paper mockups to be "interactive", so we have to draw them and then record a video where someone "clicks" on the mockup with their fingers and another person moves the papers around to make it look like an actual app that's doing something.
The teacher still insists this is something almost every company does when designing a project, so it's very important that we learn to do this kind of stuff. He's kidding, right? Have you guys ever drawn a mockup of an app instead of using some mockup software?
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college
mockup
school
time wasted