Appearance Schemas Inventory Pdf Sheet

We have all heard the adage, “Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two (you can’t have all three).” The saying might generally be true of the work we produce as designers of information-use environments. Try to test the saying against one of the deliverables we might create—a high-fidelity interface prototype, for example—and see if you can disprove it. You can produce beautiful prototypes in Illustrator, but it will cost you time and money. You can do rough prototypes quickly and cheaply by hand, but the end result won’t look as polished as the Illustrator version. Turnaround time can be relatively quick if you push your tools to perform for you. Site maps and user flow diagrams are good candidates for automation.

1. Appearance Schemas Inventory Pdf Sheets

My approach to producing deliverables is to falsify the truism. I do the demanding intellectual work first and then force the tools to succumb to my need to produce seemingly speedy deliverables. The illusion of speed happens because you do the hard work up front—planning, analyzing and documenting your work in doing content inventories, designing user flow, etc. When it is time to realize that work in a document, the turnaround time can be relatively quick if you push your tools to perform for you. In this article I illustrate one method for producing diagrams quickly using software.

The process overview We probably do most of our intellectual work in preparing deliverables before ever touching a drawing program. When the elements of the information architecture and user experience are defined, we are often expected to produce a polished document to visually represent the information. We can take a semi-automated approach to produce some of these documents using software.

Site maps and user flow diagrams are good candidates. The process I propose assumes that you’ve spent grueling hours doing the work of preparing your content inventory or sketching your user flow diagrams and now want to render your boxes and arrows for presentation. The next step in the process is to take the data produced in that intellectual work and prepare it for use in a diagramming application. I will illustrate a process that relies on text files exported from Excel and uses Visio to transform those text files into diagrams. You can also use a database management system for this process, but details about using a DBMS are out of the scope of this article. Of course if you don’t want to see your diagram in the hideous colors that Visio gives you to work with, you can copy the diagram and paste into Illustrator where you can make it more presentable and pleasant to look. Creating user flow diagrams While I think it’s rather nifty to create site maps using Visio, I have to admit that what I really prefer to create in Visio are flowcharts.

Flowcharts can be used to help the team understand how users might interact with your system. Interactions such as registration or e-commerce transactions may best be planned using flowcharts. They are also used in diagramming system logic for applications. These documents are often developed with technical people and serve to assist technical staff and graphic designers. The process for doing flowcharts in Visio is the same as the process shown above for site maps, except we will also be introducing values to specify which shapes to use. We also have to tell Visio which stencils to get the shapes from by specifying a template.

With flowcharts, there is less need to move your shapes around once you’ve imported them into Visio. I hardly ever touch the colors and fonts. I view flowcharts as utilitarian documents that are meant to illustrate system logic, so I prefer to show them in grayscale and prefer the linear top-to-bottom presentation, connecting pages with connector symbols when necessary. To get you started I will illustrate how to use the process shown above to diagram a very simple flowchart. Since you are now familiar with the file preparation, I’m just going to define the fields that can be included for the node and link sections and then show you the files combined in one import file.

Step 1: Document nodes in flowchart Flowcharting does not lend itself to listing shapes in a hierarchical list the way site maps do. The best approach is probably to first draw your flowchart on paper and number the shapes in the chart. You can then take each numbered shape and add it to your text file. All that Visio really needs to create your flowchart are a few required fields:. The “Shape Name”—the unique numerical id you give it.

The “Shape Master”—the name of the shape you want to use from the Visio template (Terminator, Processing, Decision, etc.), and. the “Shape Text”—the label for the shape. Visio will also accept a number of other values in the file you import. The order of fields should appear as follows: Shape,”Shape Name”,”Master Name”,”Shape Text”,”ShapeX”,”ShapeY”,”Width”,”Height” The first value in each line is always the word “Shape” to indicate to Visio that this is the definition for a shape it will draw.

We can simply leave off all the values following Shape Text, but we must include blank values using empty quotes (“”) for any values that we are skipping before the last value. If we don’t want to specify shape size and position, we can just skip the last four fields. I’m going to do that for this example. Step 2: Document nodal connections Since you have a sketch of your flowchart it should be fairly easy for you to create a list of the links between shapes. Visio will expect at the very least that you include:. “Master Name”, the name of the connector you will use. “From Shape (or Connector) Name”, the numerical idea or “Shape Name” from the shape list, 2) “To Shape (or Connector) Name”.

The first value in each line is always the word “Link” to indicate to Visio that this is how the shape identified in the “From Shape” value will link to a shape in the “To Shape” value. There are some additional fields that you can use including “Link Text”, a field for a text value that can appear over the connector lines. For our example, we’re going to skip the extra fields and indicate them with empty quotes.

The order of fields should appear as follows: Link,”Link Name”,”Master Name”,”Link Text”,”From Shape (or Connector) Name”,”To Shape (or Connector) Name” Step 3: Diagram in Visio Now that we know what shapes to include and how to link them, let’s look at the combined import file we would create for this simple example. We need to indicate to Visio the stencil to reference when looking for shapes identified in our “Master Name” field. So begin the first line with the keyword “Template”, followed by a comma and the name of the Visio stencil file. Stencil templates are the Visio files followed by the extension.vst. You can get the names of stencil templates and stencil files by browsing in your Visio Solutions folder (usually located in “C:Program filesVisioSolutionsFlowchart”) In this example we’ll use the flowchart template “Audit Diagram.vst”, which includes the “Audit” and the “Connectors and Callouts” stencils. Automatically generated flowchart Summary That’s all there is to it.

You now have a simple process for generating diagrams in Visio from text files. It won’t make the intellectual work of preparing content inventories or user flow specifications much easier, but it may buy you some time when it comes to rendering that information in a drawing application. If you work in an organization where you are expected to make modifications to your deliverables quickly, you might value this process.

This process will help you make modifications a bit more quickly to those specifications you’ve spent hard hours on, so you can impress your colleagues and clients with how efficient you are. For more information. For more information about IA/ID/UX deliverables, see Peter Bogaards on Info Design.

For definitions of content inventories see both and. A good article discussing how to prepare content audits and inventories is Janice Crotty Fraser’s in WebTechniques: is an information specialist and site developer at Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories in the Information Solutions department. He maintains a weblog of information architecture news. Efficiency rocks, great article! I also found having some stencils in Visio really increases my efficiency. The only drawback with being efficient is managing expectations. At my previous job, I would often be able to do a simple but yummie looking sitemap (that didn’t require much thinking) in 10 minutes, but if asked for one, I always delivered it a few hours later (when possible).

I did that because I noticed that the project managers where starting to look at sitemaps as something “Peter can quickly throw together”. It’s harder to explain the thinking time some maps need, than to let them think sitemaps just take time. I have successfully used a product called allCLEAR for about 20 years now (first the DOS and now the Windows version) for most of my charting needs. AllCLEAR works off of short sentences, like an outline structure — no need to draw anything, simply cut and paste the sentences into the diagrammer and a diagram is instantly created. It’s a great tool for work breakdown structures, flow diagrams, site maps and process flows.

I should add that I’m an avid user of NetObjects Fusion, which bases all web page development off the site map. While I’m forced to used FrontPage to maintain one site, for all the others I’ve maintained/created, Fusion is my tool of choice with City Desk a close second, noting that City Desk is a more robust content manager, so it’s great for frequenty updated areas of a site, such as press releases, blogs, etc. While Fusion allows more creativity in site navigation without coding. So if you prefer to code/must code, perhaps Fusion is a good tool to use simply for prototyping the navigation of a site with a user community. I think some import/export options were deeply buried in Visio 2003. The online help led me to this MS article content: Create a text or Excel data file to generate a Gantt chart in Visio 1.

On the File menu, point to New, point to Project Schedule, and then click Gantt Chart. In the Gantt Chart Options dialog box, click Cancel. On the Gantt Chart menu, click Import. There’s also an export option. For other drawing types, there are similar, buried options, e.g., “Organization Chart” - Import Organization Data Hope this helps! I’ve read through the whole page, and I’ve come to the decision that using the Org Chart Wizard is the fastest/easiest option for what I need to do.

So far I’ve learned that you can insert an Excel spreadsheet into a Visio doc as a table, and link it so that every time you open the Visio doc it checks for any updates to the Excel file and inserts an up-to-date table in the Visio file. However I have been asked to make an organizational chart in Visio and tie it to data stored in an Excel file. Is there any way to link the data in organizational boxes to automatically update from an Excel spreadsheet? (Example: if someone’s phone extension changes we can change it in the Excel and it will update in the Org Chart automatically) If anyone reading this knows how to do this, please contact me or post a comment here. I’m going to keep researching, but I will check back here. This article and Stephen Turbek’s 2006 article entitled “The Lazy IA’s Guide to Making Sitemaps” inspired me to develop “Lazy Sitemap Generator.” LazySitemapGenerator uses both Excel formulas and a single macro to produce a worksheet than can exported from Excel and imported into Visio.

In my example, I built a sitemap that goes seven-levels deep. You could easily modify my Excel file to add even more columns. My website documents the procedure in 20 steps, includes screen shots, and contains a link the the.ZIP file you may download to try out on your own. Ever hear of a piece of software called “Inspiration”?

It’s another great tool for creating “quick and dirty” site maps. Basically it allows you to import your Excel document (or enter your information directly) into its “outline” view Providing a hierarchy as you described: 1.0 Home 1.1 Section 1.2 etc. Then it allows you to dynamically switch from that “outline” view to what it calls the “diagram” view. Basically it automatically converts your hierarchical listing into a site map. The default diagram is definitely better than that default Visio import, but still has plenty of room for improvement. And to accomodate that, it does have basic tools to allow you to change shaps, colors, fonts, etc The tools are not quite as nice as Visio (nor anywhere near as flexible as Illustrator) but they are definitely good enough to get the job done. And perhaps one of the best features of Inpiration is that unlike Visio it work on Macintosh as well as Windows!!!

Anyway I’m starting to feel like a salesman (which I’m not) so I’ll leave you with a link to their site And a “down and dirty” example of what the software can do These are 140 pages of unpolished site maps that were literally produced in a matter of hours 1MB (Caution: I’ve heard this download is painfully slow, so be patient.) Enjoy! Do you really make your flowcharts in Excel before putting them into Visio? You find this.easy.? To me, Visio’s core strength is not in its ability to render easy-to-understand diagrams (although that is clearly a plus). Rather, it is useful because it allows you to QUICKLY translate abstract ideas about cause-effect relationships, information structures, etc.

Into concrete documentation. It seems to me that designing the flowchart for, say, a simple registration process might take me about 10 or 20 times longer if I did it in Excel first. I’ve often heard of the benefits of using the Visio/Excel connection to translate graphic information into spreadsheet data (for example to convert a graphical site map into a tabular content inventory). But this is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone suggest going in the other direction. Am I missing something about the benefits of this? For flowcharting an interaction, I’m not sure it’s that efficient, but for site maps it could be quite useful. It’s not really creating your flowcharts in Excel as much as creating a flowchart based on your content matrix, which you’re doing anyway.

I’m currently working on a project involving three global sites, each with hundreds of pages (the content matrix takes up 20+ tabloid pages). Having to hand-draw site maps that large is a real pain — particularly when all-too-often revisions occur. Visio 2002 gives you more control over how the diagram gets laid out, so I’m experimenting with that to see if I can avoid the sort of clean-up Michael talks about — since that’s the major obstacle to this being useful for me.

Anything that could potentially squash two steps (1. Create the content outline; 2. Create the flow chart) into 1 would be great.

The clean-up as George mentioned is the rub. I’ve been playing with the text import in Visio for a while and have not been able to create a chart that is NOT radial (probably the layout least able to be cleaned up easily). There is a placementstyle field that can be used, but doesn’t seem to work. Anyone else run into this? Granted I’m running Visio2000 which may have a bearing. Inspiration is a wonderful tool simply on account of its built-in outliner. It’s limitation is it’s unprecise page controls for multipage documents.

To answer Christopher Fahey’s question: Do you really make your flowcharts in Excel before putting them into Visio? You find this.easy.? I said this in the article: The best approach is probably to first draw your flowchart on paper and number the shapes in the chart. That’s what I have done in the past — draw flow charts on paper and then number and put into Excel.

I worked with some software development teams where the flow charts were created to document offline processes/work flow to understand how a program that we were working on could mimick these steps. After going through the process with users, we diagrammed on paper what we thought we were hearing and flowed that into Excel/Visio. As we went through the flow charts, we found inconsistencies I made modifications via the spreadsheets, and was able to automate the changes. Do I find the process easy? I found that it made it quicker to make changes.

I did NOT worry so much about how pretty these charts turned out, and it helped that individual aspects of interaction were broken up into many use cases. Each case was diagrammed on 11″x17″ paper, so I didn’t worry much about having to continue across multiple pages. In any case, the process is one that I used in the past, but not every time. I only used it for large scale projects. For smaller projects, I actually have been trying to use OmniGraffle more. I admit, after trying Inspiration for a few days, that I’m going to consider using that for my next project.

Appearance Schemas Inventory Pdf Sheets

I’m not really married to any tool, but really love when I can use a tool to do my work a little more efficiently. Thank you, thank you, thank you to Benjamin Bennett – you’ve made my life SO much easier! I read this article the day I was starting to map a huge web-based application site for a client. My first reaction was, “Is the author nuts? How is using two applications automating anything?” (This is still my reaction.) But I read through the comments, and came across Bennett’s mention of Inspiration.

I immediately downloaded the trial copy and used it to map a third of the app in just one afternoon – a feat that would’ve taken at least a couple of long days using Visio (the longer MS has owned this app, the more bloated and harder to use it’s gotten). It’s a good-looking map, too, just using the defaults. The learning curve is practically non-existent, especially compared with Visio (let alone adding Excel into the mix). I bought the software – the biz version, which has more useful templates than the school version – and I’m happy to say that I’m abandoning Visio. I’ve been using Inspiration for over a year now and find it extremely helpful and quick. I usually start with the Outline-List, Inspiration makes a diagram out of that and I use only that diagram for the changes.

If you use the Outline-List again, you have to rearrange the boxes all the time. The drawback of Inspiration is that you can only export your sitemaps as bitmaps or jpgs for the use in Word-files.

Printed with a colour printer, those sitemaps do not look very sharp, but rather blurry – nothing you really want to show a customer. Jutta, about Inspiration and printing out the maps. First, you can print them right from the application.

Second, the maps I get by exporting as.gif files and inserting them into Word or Powerpoint are very clear, very sharp, and my clients love them – I’ve printed them on both a heavy-duty Tektronic and my $100 kind-of-crappy Epson color printer. What’s more, if I export to a bitmap and convert it to a.tif, I can resize them easily. So far, the only real criticism I have is not being able to export the outline as a Word document – but that’s mainly because Word2K is such a horrible word processor that it’s hard to work with anything in it. No matter what drawbacks found in Inspiration, it still beats using Visio (and the Visio/Excel combo) by a country mile. It’s turned mapping from a horrible chore into a handy tool that’s actually a pleasure to use. It’s also been interesting to try to analyze Inspiration to figure out what makes it so human-friendly — but that’s a topic for another post. Two things has bothered me about using the Excel/text import option in Visio.

The first I’m mentioned above (radial layout). The second is that you have to create two separate lists (one for shapes, the other for links) to create a map.

I did a little exploring in Visio and found a far superior import mechanism, the Organizational Chart Wizard. For it, you prepare one list in Excel, one that includes a field for “reports to” which for IA chart purposes is a nodes parent. You can also add a field to specify a master shape. As you import, it gives you choices about what information to include in each shape (for organizational charts that might be employee and phone extension, for IA that may be title and comments).

It also has a page break feature that allows you set how much is show on each page (this info is also saved as default so if you have to re-edit your Excel file, it’s a snap to re-import). After importing, the Org Chart wizard turns on other Org Chart features that help with cleaning up the formatting, and one last very cool feature: when you drop a shape onto a another, it automatically links the dropped shape as the other’s child (very cool)! Two things has bothered me about using the Excel/text import option in Visio.

The first I’m mentioned above (radial layout). The second is that you have to create two separate lists (one for shapes, the other for links) to create a map. I did a little exploring in Visio and found a far superior import mechanism, the Organizational Chart Wizard. For it, you prepare one list in Excel, one that includes a field for “reports to” which for IA chart purposes is a nodes parent. You can also add a field to specify a master shape. As you import, it gives you choices about what information to include in each shape (for organizational charts that might be employee and phone extension, for IA that may be title and comments). It also has a page break feature that allows you set how much is show on each page (this info is also saved as default so if you have to re-edit your Excel file, it’s a snap to re-import).

After importing, the Org Chart wizard turns on other Org Chart features that help with cleaning up the formatting, and one last very cool feature: when you drop a shape onto a another, it automatically links the dropped shape as the other’s child (very cool)! Visio from Access isn’t so crazy if you’re dealing with really large sites. Right now I’ve got a content matrix that takes up 20 tabloid-sized pages — and it will grow even larger as the sites get split from regional-level sites into country specific sites in future releases. With that much information — and with multiple views of it needed — it makes sense to database. Actually, I’m been thinking a lot about how various deliverables might be better databased/automated. For example, cross-indexing personas and scenarios to more technical user case specs. BTW, if anyone’s done sophisticated site map automation with Visio I could use a few tips.

Haven’t actually moved stuff to Access yet, but thinking about it. As far as flowchart layout, Visio’s Org Chart wizard actually gives you pretty good control over things — unfortunately it doesn’t support as many chunks of info as I need. I’m looking at trying to hack the Visio script that runs it if I can figure out where to find it. But unfortunately, while there’s some good info on Microsoft’s site (look under Visio in the developers’ area) there’s nothing that’s specific enough to solving this problem. BTW, if there are any Microsofties out there, putting up articles and some samples people could use could be a good way to interest IAs etc. As drawing tool it doesn’t stand out from the crowd, it’s the automation capabilities that are the difference that make a difference.

With all this talk, it sure seems like there is abundant room in the market for a dedicated site-mapping/content indexing application. Everything mentioned above seems like a huge hack. I’m a Mac user recently forced to use a Windows machine full time. I used to do most of my sitemapping in Freehand, but now as I am doing much larger sites and also needing to deal with user-paths, I’ve been playing with Visio.

If find Visio cumbersome, to say the least in terms of ‘whipping out’ a quick map. I see a lot of value in the excel spreadsheet content index and being able to interface that directly with a visual map of said information. Unfortunately, you need to use Excel and Visio.;( Any developers listening? Lorraine, OPTION 1: TAB DELIMITTED TXT Going back over this — I use OmniGraffle more than Visio now — you really don’t need your cell values surrounded with quotes for Visio to recognize them. Moreover, you really don’t need to use CSV. To make things easier, just save as tab delimmited — which doesn’t quote cell values when exported. Visio will have no trouble delimitting cells, and you can just ignore the option in Visio’s “Visio File Converter” dialog box that asks for Text Delimmiter.

Just leave it set to “. OPTION 2: CSV When you save as.csv, however, you may find that Excel will put quotes around cell values which have commas in them, but will leave cell values unquoted if they don’t contain commas. If this happens, you can either surround each cell with quotes manually or simply remove all quotes by doing a global replace in a text editor. I figured it out (a while ago), I forgot I posted it on here. I tried this before, and it failed to work, so now I feel like an idiotbut here’s how you do it. To get the label under the shape to appear on multiple line, the shape record should look something like this: Shape,ID,Master,”First line Second Line Etc.

Etc”, Simple as that. IT should be pointed out that I asked Microsoft Canada for assistance and was talking to a girl for a long time (about a week) and even a senior developer couldn’t figure it out. 🙂 I got VERY good at this, so if anyone has a similar question regarding making drawings from text files, feel free to write me! I have to mention that at the time that I wrote this, Visio / Excel was a servicable solution for a few projects I was working on. Since writing the article, which was mainly to open up discussion about automated ways of converting data to diagrams, I have spent a lot of time looking for other tools to replace Visio for converting external data to diagrams.

Inspiration is very nice, but the ability to import and convert external data is lacking at the moment, unless I wasn’t finding that feature and it is actually there. I have found that AT&T Lab’s Graphviz is a very powerful solution and the team I work with used it with a script written by Randal Schwartz to create diagrams from Apache referrer files. I’m presently trying different ways of getting data out of databases and from flatfiles to create diagrams. 60-second map recipe for Word and Inspiration + Create a blank RTF document. + Open it in MS-Word’s outline mode.

+ Type in your page titles. + Use promote and demote to indicate parent/child relationships.

+ Open RTF document in Inspiration. + Inspiration will convert it. + Hit the Arrange button and presto You’ve got yourself a nicely formatted site map. Inspiration also exports to RTF so data can be later re-Worded. Caveat: this trick works well for simple hierarchical maps for smaller sites. Inspiration seems to choke on sites/departments over 100 pages. But when it works, it works.

Hello, regarding Lorraine’s question, “cannot get my CSV file generated from Excel to include the double quotes”, if anyone at B&A is reading, Michael’s answer should be included on the main article, as I spent hours playing with excel and a text editor with no success. Then I came here, read through all the posts, and here it was.

A needless headache. A suggestion: remove quotes and commas from the excel file. Shouldn’t be needed, but it seems to be.

By the way, Access is pretty straightforward getting CSVs the right way, also filtering is easier (even without typing sql). Can somebody explain to me what the good of making sites maps like this actually is? I can see the point of a high-level sketch of the “areas” of a site, connected in some way to demonstrate how the content is “structured” to get the overall point accross – but a programmatically created page-by-page detailed monster thing like this? Once you’ve got more than about 100 nodes you’re in stupid territory. Who’s gonna read it?

All they can do is print it out. What are they expected to do with it? Test it somehow? What happens when the nodes aren’t pages, but content for conditional steps or something? I don’t get it. I can see the point behind the flow chart thing maybe – but personally I’d choose use cases. Far easier to put together use cases (and for team memebers to consume them) if things are complicated.

Seems like this Visio import technique is only good for very simple sites, or for when you wanna show off and annoy the dev team. Using Visio 2003, I’ve found the Organization Wizard is the easiest approach to generate a diagram from a text file. However, I can’t get specifications that I’ve made in the Master Shape column of my spreadsheet (which map to shapes that I drew and placed in a custom stencil) to appear on the generated diagram after import. Are master shape specifications in the spreadsheet limited to masters in the “Organization Chart” stencil (which ships with Visio and is not editable) only? Anybody else run into this – or other problems specifying master shapes and not having them appear properly? If anybody is wondering why getting this Visio feature to work is important to me, it’s because I spent a significant amount of time creating shapes in custom Visio stencils.

I decided to create custom shapes because the ones that ship with Visio aren’t very professional in appearance, and don’t visually communicate concepts that I use regularly on web site maps including: ‘linked file’, ‘email link’, ‘dynamic content’, ‘form validation’ and ‘form appears on page’ properly. I have a strong desire to use text files to create flowcharts in Visio. However, defining a looping structure via the text file creates a very ugly flowchart. Process A links to process B process B links to process C process C links to process A the connection that Visio draws from process C to process A is horrible. At a minimum I would like to specify that all connections coming into a process should come into the TOP of the process shape and all connections leaving a process should come out of the bottom of the process shape.

Also, it would be nice if Visio did not draw connections on top of other connections. Additionally, I would like to able to define which point on a decision diamond that a connection will come out of. Is this possible? Thanks ahead of time for any assistance.