Smart graphics for visual people
UserFocus has released a cool set of user experience shapes for Visio users that are involved with user experience activities or produce user experience deliverables.
This free Visio stencil contains 34 master shapes that will help you to illustrate your research plan and show the types of deliverables you will produce.
The last time I flew the Amsterdam to Seattle route on Northwest Airlines, I noticed an interesting graphic while trying to figure out how to watch a movie with the in-flight entertainment system.
The graphic showed a clever way to squeeze more steps into a gauge-graphic without using more space.
Of course I couldn’t resist turning it into a Visio SmartShape. You can download it here and use it your presentations and documentation to show ratings, status, priority or other relative data values that will pop off the page when illustrated visually!
[Read more…] about Turn It Up With the NW Airlines Volume Gauge!
The other day, I visited one of my favorite coffee houses in Munich: Aran. While sipping my mocha, the logo on the cup gave me the idea for a Visio SmartShape:
A title shape that automatically places each character in a circle.
The cup graphics look something like the thumbnail you see at the beginning of this article. In fact, I used the newly-created SmartShape to make that a-r-a-n that you see in the square.
[Read more…] about Run Circles Around Your Text With the Circle-text Title SmartShape
I’ve seen much buzz lately regarding breadcrumb shapes in Visio.
Evidently a lot of folks are using Visio for IA and wireframes. Yup, you can lay-out and design web-sites with good ol’ Visio!
So I decided to create a Visio Breadcrumbs Shape to help web-site designers more quickly finish their prototypes. This shape incorporates some smart-behavior that should save you a lot of time!
[Read more…] about Design Web Pages With This Visio Breadcrumbs Shape
I found some blog posts about pixel rulers for Visio. It seems that folks wanted to dimension their Visio shapes in pixels, which Visio doesn’t technically support by default.
But for folks who use Visio to do web-layout wireframes, information architecture and storyboarding, pixel-dimensioning is a useful thing to be able to do!
An earlier article on Visio Guy served up the Rack Unit Dimension Line, which can actually be configured to measure shapes in terms of pixels. But to save time, I’ve modified that shape and offered it here, for your pixel-dimensioning enjoyment.
Evidently, lots of designers are using Visio to layout pages. As you dig around on the web, you’ll bump into terms such as IA, Information Architecture, Storyboarding, and Wireframes. These all have to do with designing the look and feel of web pages or other documents.
If you’re doing any sort of page-layout design, you might be interested in quickly creating paragraphs and sections of dummy text that you can format according to the page’s style characteristics. So I thought it would be neat to design a Visio SmartShape that automatically repeats a chunk of text over and over, to speed up the process of laying out a page.
[Read more…] about Lorem Ipsum – Visio IA Text Placeholder Shape