This tool will allow you to patch together some real data behind functioning controls and create really good mock ups of Rich Internet Applications. It’s probably nothing that a visual programming tool like VB doesn’t already give you, but I think it will be a lot more oriented towards designers and the design process.

Visio helps quite a lot with its layered drawing structure (background can have a background) and inter-page links (any object can point to a page inside the drawing).

This way you’re completely able to create a interactive wireframes faster than coding anything.

Microsoft is using Visio in-house just for this purpose (see http://blogs.msdn.com/mailant/archive/2005/01/31/364043.aspx).

Seriously, though, I think this is a really important step for the profession. We’ve been massively enriched by the influx of people from all sorts of backgrounds, creating some great work at the confluence of computer science, design theory, social science and information design. But we need to better integrate the parts into a whole. One step on that path is for the social scientists (like myself) to get their hands dirty in the medium.

I have a few more posts brewing on the topic, and now feel ready to tackle the Cooper vs 37 Signals question with this prelude in place.

It reminds of this Steve Jobs interview where he states
“It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

There is a point where the burden of creating soo many wireframes to explicitly show how every in page action works becomes greater than the burden to code a clunky buggy prototype. The best argument for coding prototypes is that it’s often just quicker.

Take for example a javascript date range selector. To design the interaction explicitly (and by that I mean clear enough that there are no cop outs for a lazy programmer trying to minimise the workload), it would take at least 4 wireframes, and a fair chunk of annotation to explain all the calendar logic.
i.e.
1. All state changes are done within the page through client side unobtrusive javascript
2. Once start date is selected all dates previous are greyed out in the End Date option, and not selectable
3. User can still enter date range manually via text field, for accessibility.
4. Visual indication must highlight range when selected in color
5. blah
6. blah
7. blah

Whereas, it would take all of 2 minutes to copy and paste an example into a html file
(e.g. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/calendar/quickstart.html )

People are falling over themselves trying to come up with the best way to wireframe AJAX interactions, the bigger question is “should we be doing that at all?”