I don’t often talk about my job on The Clog because I like to separate the shit I do for a living from the shit I do to contribute absolutely nothing to history.
But a specific topic has arisen again and again over the last year, one I never hear broached with any gravity.
Is Visio the best piece of software for interaction designers?
While at — let’s call it Agency A — last spring, I found myself in a mostly harmonious PC/Apple world. Some of the staff had Apple notebooks or desktops, some of the staff had PC laptops or desktops. Nearly everyone used one or more Adobe products, which eased the pain of sharing documents between platforms.
No one at Agency A used Visio.
While at — Internet Giant A — last fall, I landed in an environment partial to the Apple design philosophy, which is one of my favorites: if you didn’t use a Mac, it’s not real.
No one at Internet Giant A used Visio.
I ended 2005 working on a gratifying and challenging project that will change the course of economies for centuries to come. My agency — Agency B — and my client were of the Apple Universe, with its shiny, pretty things in abundance, like a properly governed utopia for Oompa Loompas. Their demands for a tool that embodies the illustration of complexity pointed to an important possibility.
But no one at Agency B or the client used Visio.
I’ve been using Visio since it had small integers to denote versions, way back before Microsoft bought it. Visio 5 Enterprise edition was a work of art. You could produce graphic objects, place them with cartographic precision, and layer everything, as Adobe did so much better.
Visio was never a designer’s tool. But it’s becoming one. It was built by engineers for engineers, and couldn’t have cared less about the esthetics of its output. Visio 5 strongly suggested that the prestidigitation of Illustrator could be easily matched by an application that looked at the “design construction” problem through a different lens.
I characterize the difference between Visio and Illustrator — from an interaction design point of view — as the difference between an Etch-a-Sketch and a playground sandbox. Hands down, Illustrator is the more powerful design tool, if you define design as the requirement for finesse and nuance. Visio, on the other hand, is what you sketch out of it. Its amazing grid and snap system is mostly unintrusive. It lends itself to lo-fi renderings, like wireframes. It’s annotation tools are absent from Illustrator, and, with the injection of Microsoft cash, it can now yield transparencies and shape intersections with the best of them. And thank the deities for pagination. Illustrator, you lose (rather, InDesign wins!).
As a tool for distinguishing between requirements and options, or expressing multiple dimensions of interaction in a single display, Visio is also just faster. Out of the box, it’s equipped with templates and shapes that make a lot of redundant work go away. Drawing arrows. Simple underlining of text. Smarter object selection.
I like marching into a client meeting with documents that could come from any decent illustration software, but which doesn’t come from illustration software at all.