Indie Interaction Design

Posted by Kris on 09.09.11 | Comment

Welcome to another installment of our Use Case Profile series, wherein we highlight OMNI APPS—IN ACTION with real working professionals.

We’re always delighted to receive email from customers who’ve experienced unbridled productivity with their favorite Omni app. Every now and then a story like this comes along and we get all giddy about sharing it. Having undoubtedly maxed-out our “this is why we do what we do” affirmations with our loved ones, we figure our blog might be a better outlet for inspiring others to unlock the potential of the Omni productivity suite.

Today’s contribution comes from Libby Donovan, a freelance designer from Los Angeles, whose enthusiasm about OmniGraffle prompted her to develop a ‘Wireframing with OmniGraffle’ class for Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts.

She writes,

I spent ten years working for Microsoft in Redmond, mainly on a PC using Visio for Information Architecture and other work that OmniGraffle would have been perfect for. In 2010, I moved back home to Los Angeles and began looking for work for both myself and my start-up design agency, Mercyluxe Design Group, and found that 90% of the open job descriptions out there required OmniGraffle skills, as it was looked at as what would soon become the industry standard within the IA community. When I began working at MySpace as an independent contractor, I was told that while I could use any program I wished to use, their preference was OmniGraffle as they had already amassed a large set of stencils that were shared amongst the IA and Design teams who were working on the redesign together. The fact that OmniGraffle had taken such a hold on the design and IA communities in LA told me that this was a program that at the very least I needed to seriously investigate.

Larry Asher, who runs The School of Visual Concepts in Seattle is an acquaintance of mine, and we were talking about OmniGraffle and I was (loudly!) singing its praises - specifically discussing how my move from Seattle to LA necessitated me to learn the program. “You just can’t get work down here with out knowing OmniGraffle, Larry, it’s the future, it’s coming!” is pretty much what I told him. Since I moved to LA I’ve been, what I call “OmniGrafflin’ my tail off” for folks like MySpace, Disney and Will >Smith (yup, THAT Will Smith!) :)

Woah! I can only imagine the focus it must have taken to produce AI and UI mockups for Mr. MIB himself. Personally, I couldn’t resist the temptation to create a Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song flow chart, but clearly Libby can get jiggy with discipline.

While working with each client, I have found that OmniGraffle allows me the freedom to build upon each of my design principles and concepts in an almost organic way, bridging the gap between the idea and expression of that idea other programs just donʼt >allow.

For example, my desire to find a perfect balance between Swiss design principles and maximum color effectiveness would have faltered under the rigid guidelines of Visio and its inability to work alongside todayʼs top design programs. During the Will Smith project, however, OmniGraffle showed its chops by allowing for effortless compatibility with Adobeʼs Creative Suite, allowing me to fuse Visual Design, Interaction Design and Information Architecture. The finished comps were, looking back, about 80% OmniGraffle, 20% Illustrator and Photoshop. Iʼve found [OmniGraffle] allows for such quick mock-ups and edits that you can prototype rapidly – really at the speed of the design conversation.

She goes on to explain which OmniGraffle features are most helpful in her workflow:

I love the ability to draw from my giant collection of stencils, templates and icons, with the ability to add more from the community with ease. The OmniGraffle UI and feature sets also allows for very rapid prototyping, something that other programs just don’t allow for.

One of the first things I do when I start a new project (after putting on my official OmniGraffle kick off song, “Intergalactic” by Beastie Boys – true!) is a quick inventory of my stencil collection to see if I have everything I need to get started. Most of the time I don’t – I’m in need of a particular UI element like a slider, and it has to be a certain kind of slider, a UI element from a particular brand of mobile device, or even just the right radio button, I’m off to Graffletopia to comb through their huge stencil collection to see if they have what I need. Most of the time they do, thanks to the awesome community mentioned above. When they don’t, that’s when I head back to Photoshop or Illustrator to create something original that matches the style I’m using and easily import it into OmniGraffle when I’m ready. Doing it old school.

And which Stencil is her favorite?

I am very fond of the Konigi set, it’s my absolute favorite and I use it pretty much daily. I love how clean it is and how it lends itself so neatly to almost any project that can be imagined. There’s also a unicorn stencil included. What else do you need? Well, maybe the ability to use those stencils to create wireframes while you’re out ‘n’ about, right? First, that OmniGraffle for the iPad EXISTS is a big win, making the program extremely versatile and the very nature of agile. The iPad app feels very much like a natural extension of the Mac version. I like how I can use my stencils from the Mac on the iPad making adjustments to a project or coming up with quick interactions studies for example while on the go that much easier. In addition, the freehand option is also very nice for those high-tech “cocktail napkin” times. Since they both work together so well, it’s not possible to pick one over the other, especially as I use them both for very different purposes – the desktop version for my main Grafflin’ and the iPad for quick mock ups, changes on the fly and presentation with room for experimentation and augmentation right then and there.

There you have it, folks - another shining example of OMNI APPS—IN ACTION, and a refreshing testament to our raison d’être.

Thank you, Libby, for sharing your story and samples with us - inspiring stuff, indeed!

If you have a use case that you’d like to share with us, please drop a line in the comments or via email, we’d love to hear it!

Simone’s story: using OmniGraffle to draw comics

Posted by Linda Sharps on 04.19.10 | 11 Comments

You guys, I hope you're not getting sick of our customer stories, but even if you ARE, you should stick around for this one. Because it's awesome. And involves monsters. 

Today we're going to be taking a look at how a comic artist uses OmniGraffle as his primary drawing tool, thanks to some fantastic info sent in by Simone Poggi. Simone is a developer/designer/illustrator who draws comics in his spare time—he's currently publishing his fantasy comic Another One Quest to Dust on the App Store, and he's working on an Android survival fantasy game as well. 

He writes,

I use Graffle to draw, it's like paper and pencil for me. Over the years Graffle has become my primary drawing tool, extending the way I create stuff to a whole new level. Today my skill with Graffle neatly surpass my freehand drawing abilities.

I have to say, out of the many ways I've seen OmniGraffle being used, I think this might be one of the most fun. It's never even occurred to me that you could create an entire comic with OmniGraffle, but of course you can! It just goes to show that my rejected marketing tagline, "OmniGraffle: Not Just For Diagramming Although It Is Very Good At Diagramming All We're Saying is That You Can, Like, Totally Use it for Other Stuff Too", was right all along.

Simone tells us which features are most helpful for him:

I really love the way Graffle manages the Bezier shapes and colors because it's really, really simple and intuitive, but at the same time it's powerful. You can easily create any shape, apply a color or a texture to it, set the desired transparency, and change a thousand options (gradients, shadows, rotation, scale, etc) to perfectly fit your needs. You can finely set your working area by giving your desired resolution in various unit measures.The level/layer/working area options are really useful as well to manage images, background and graphical effects in a separate way, without interfering with other parts of the image. Furthermore the export function works great and you can export in a wide array of filetypes, deciding (if allowed by the format) to set a transparent background or not.

You're thinking, that's great and all, but how does one go about drawing shiny stuff that rocks in OmniGraffle? Well, it is mighty convenient that you phrased your thoughts in that specific way, because Simone put together a tutorial to show you exactly how to do this. Let's take a look (Simone's instructions are in bold):

Start with a blank document, then:

Click on the Pen Tool (what Simone is describing as "new bezier shape") and place the points in the drawing area as shown in the above picture. Hold "command" key and drag one point away to generate a bezier curve from the selected point. If you need an asymmetric spline, just hold "alt" key while dragging the vector, this would modify only one vector of them instead of both.

We have a fine head shape: add the eyes from the stencils (drag out circles from the Shape stencil), resize and place them at the proper position

Now we have to tweak the line's details to improve the epicness factor of our masterpiece. We will enhance the thickness of the head's shape by selecting it, and setting to 4 pixels.

(Hee. Improving the epicness factor.)

Let's give some color to our creation. First, the background: change the color through the inspector button in the "fill" tab. Repeat and do the same for the eyes and the head as shown below:

Our work is almost ready! Now let's add some shinies with a glass effect!

Copy / paste the head shape, then add a new circle:

Select both the new head and the newly created circle, go to "edit" > "shapes" > "intersect shapes" menu. We now have a new object, shaped as the intersection from the head's shape and the new circle's shape.

Edit the newly obtained shape as follows: 

... and place it over the original head:

Our monster now is quite nice, but it looks like he's floating in air, let's fix this!

Through the stencil panel insert a new circle, then change his properties as follows:

- shape the circle as an oval

- fill with solid color: black 30% transparency

- no border, no shadow

Now we have to put this shadow under the monster: select the shape, then click on the "send to background" button:

Finished! Our masterpiece is done for now! You may save and exit or export your creation in various formats, to share it with your friends and with your enemies, too.

Hello, AWESOME. I know what I'll be doing for the rest of my afternoon. Monsters ahoy!

I asked Simone if there was anything he could change about OmniGraffle, and he conceded there are a few things that bug him:

Each time I double-click somewhere (as I often do when I try to insert additional points to a previuosly created shape) Graffle adds a text label. I hate that feature and I wanna kill it personally from a menu option in the preferences.

Yes, this can be annoying—I've encountered it too. Be sure that when you're double-clicking to add a point, you're doing so on the edge of the shape itself so you won't get that pesky label.

There is no way to draw an "open" Bezier shape. Every time you create a new shape, you can only choose between applying a border to it or nor. It would be great if I can choose to create a "broken shape" in a fast way. Actually i have to draw the shape and then redraw a Bezier Line over it.

Gotcha. Our intrepid OmniGraffle product manager, Joel, tells me this is a filed feature request, so hopefully you'll see it addressed in an upcoming release. Also, just so you know, this feature is currently implemented in OmniGraffle for iPad.

I'd really like to use gradient colors for the lines as it is now for the shape's area.

A workaround idea: create a slightly smaller shape, and place it on top of the larger shape so you can see the outline. Voila, hacked gradient outline!

Graffle still does not make coffee! Please stop disappointing me and implement this feature.

Simone, I could not agree with you more. I am emailing our engineers RIGHT NOW to find out the reasoning behind this critical design flaw.

A huge thank you to Simone for providing all this great information. You can find Simone on his website, and check out his Another One Quest to Dust comic online or on the App Store. If you'd like a copy of the OmniGraffle file he used to create this tutorial, you can download it here. 

Customer story: managing work tasks with OmniFocus

Posted by Linda Sharps on 04.12.10 | 11 Comments

Welcome to another post in our ongoing series of real-life customer stories, which are kind of like case studies only hopefully a little less prone to making the claim that our "innovative solutions" are improving anyone's "bottom line". Let it be known that we here at Omni feel it's inappropriate to monkey with your bottom line.

Today we're talking about OmniFocus, and how Mr. Tim Metz, managing director of Yourzine China, makes good use of it. Tim writes,

My brain relies on OmniFocus so much these days I could be considered a "junkie" if it were a drug. I often consider sending my short term memory on a permanent holiday to the Bahamas as OmniFocus does all the work for me: managing my email, keeping track of delegated tasks and remembering those valuable ideas that seem to pop up at the strangest of moments for future use. 

(I love everything about this, and yet I think there's room for improvement. Could OmniFocus and my short term memory get together on the emails and whatnot while the rest of me takes that Bahamas vacation? I'm going to file a feature request.)

Tim's a GTD fan, and uses OmniFocus to support those methodologies:

To me OmniFocus is really the next logical step in the evolution of personal organization: (1) using a classic paper to do list - (2) your inbox is your to do list - (3) the Getting Things Done method - (4) OmniFocus.  David Allen so strikingly describes what happens when you use your inbox as your todo list: you lose the overview and you find yourself repeatedly skipping certain hard to-do items over and over again. Moving from that behavior to the GTD system is then a revelation. However, as things get more and more busy, I found the same happens with the GTD system: it's hard to keep track of all your next actions, emails and projects, even when you have them nicely organized in folders, your calendar and a word document. As soon as you lose trust in your system, you will start worrying about forgetting things and can't focus on the task at hand with a clear mind, which is the goal after all. This is where OmniFocus comes in.

What I love most about OmniFocus is that it allows me to capture everything I need to do in one place. No more mail folders with "next actions" or word documents where you might forget to look, everything goes to OmniFocus. The best example of this is email. Running a 30-people internet marketing agency in China, I have a daily steady stream of email to be dealt with that is challenging to say the least. Of course I stick to the rule of trying to handle things that can be done in under 2 minutes immediately, but sometimes you just don't want to deal with something at that moment but also make sure you don't forget about it. With OmniFocus I press one button, add a due date and hit enter and the email is filed for later review, without ever having to leave my mail program. 

Upon switching to OmniFocus at a later stage, I sort all my tasks in a custom made "due" view and I'm sure I won't miss the email that has to be dealt with, but I do it at my convenience and without having to worry about forgetting it.

Another great feature is the way "contexts" can be used. Contexts are the extended versions of "locations" as described by David Allen. So you assign a "home" context to tasks that can only be done at home, an "office" context to things that can only be done at the office and I use an "iPhone" context for websites that I want to check out and can easily read on my iPhone. 

My favorite context though is the "waiting" context. In this special context, I park all the important tasks that I have delegated to other people. Not every little wishy washy thing of course, because my colleagues are very capable of managing their own work, but assignments that are critical and can't be forgotten about no matter what. By safely storing them in this context and adding a recurring task for myself to check the "waiting" context every other day, I help myself to be a thoughtful manager for my colleagues and inquire at the right moment about the progress of certain tasks and if there's anything I can do to help.

Talking about people and contexts: another great way of using contexts is by adding people you interact with a lot as a context. For me this greatly helps to reduce the mailflow between my colleagues and me. Often mails go back and forth several times on a topic while it could be dealt with in a minute if you were to discuss it face-to-face with each other. On the other hand you also don't want to stand next to someone's desk every hour. Here the "people" context is great: when my colleague Bruce sends me an email that I want to further discuss with him, I file it to the context "Bruce" and leave it at that for the moment. Then whenever I have a meeting with Bruce, I'll check his context on my iPhone while entering the meeting and discuss with him in person the issues that are listed there. Much better than a chain of emails that can span a whole day.

This brings me to the iPhone OmniFocus app. Since it syncs with OmniFocus on my computer over the WiFi of our office, I use OmniFocus to take notes during meetings. My experience is that most meetings lead to actions / tasks, and previously my assistant or me would write them down on a piece of paper. However, after having several meetings in a day, I would have multiple papers with multiple actions that still had to go into my GTD system or OmniFocus. It often ended up not happening if I had a lot of notes. 

Now I have my iPhone during the meeting and record tasks directly into OmniFocus during the meeting. Not only will it be synced immediately with my computer, I don't have to process the written notes anymore and I can even add a "context", "project" and if necessary "due date" on the spot, right there in the meeting.

Last but not least is reviewing, one of the most crucial parts of the GTD method. If you don't review regularly and update what has been done, which next actions still need to be answered, etc. the whole GTD system will fall apart. Now OmniFocus already has a nice review option by itself, but the iPhone app really brings the reviewing process to another level for me. Because reviewing and organizing your tasks in itself doesn't add to whatever you need to get done, it's a bit of a waste of your valuable office time that could be used for other things. This is where the iPhone comes in: it allows you to do the organizing of your tasks on idle moments when you could otherwise not do much else: in a taxi, on the subway, in a queue. Back in the office it will sync with your computer over WiFi and you're all set again!

These are just some of the ways OmniFocus can be deployed in daily busy work life. But besides some of the applications described above, I can highly recommend it as a gift. It's great to help other busy people you know straight from the "inbox-to-do-list" stage straight to the OmniFocus stage of organizing your tasks. They will instantly get it and they will be thankful forever :)

There was so much great stuff in Tim's email I pretty much included everything as is, and I hope you find it as interesting as I did! You can find Tim at his online marketing company, Yourzine, at his electronic music production company, Dancetrippin, or on LinkedIn. Thank you, Tim, for sharing your story with us.

Aaron’s story: OmniGraffle

Posted by Linda Sharps on 04.05.10 | 3 Comments

Today's customer story comes from Aaron, who works as a problem solver for a large company that develops software for the healthcare industry.

(Side note: I have to admit I'm a little intimidated by someone whose actual job title involves solving problems. You know, speaking as someone who has on more than one occasion found herself shoving as hard as possible against a door clearly marked "PULL", just like that old Far Side cartoon.) 

Aaron writes,

I really love using diagrams as a way to help me think and keep my ideas organized.  When I was in college taking computer science classes, I used OmniGraffle to take notes.  You can't get through a computer science class without drawing a ton of diagrams, and with my lousy handwriting (and affinity for keeping everything neatly on my Mac for later use) I decided to give OmniGraffle a shot.  At first, it was very difficult to keep up with the professor writing diagrams on the whiteboard, but I quickly learned to use OmniGraffle's nifty keyboard shortcuts. I also made stencils for the most common building blocks of the data structures I was making diagrams of.  That, plus liberal use of copying and pasting, allowed me to efficiently take notes, and sometimes do it even more quickly than my classmates—it's common for something to get drawn on the board that's important, but then the professor erases a few parts and replaces those with new parts to make a whole new diagram.  On paper, this means quickly trying to draw your diagram again.  In OmniGraffle, it's a quick copy and paste. 

Here are a few screenshots of Aaron's old Graffle-created class notes:

He acknowledges these aren't necessarily the fanciest diagrams ever, and reminds us that when you're taking notes in class, you usually don't spend a ton of time making them super pretty. Totally understood! They look a heck of a lot nicer than MY class notes, which are typically covered in my pen doodle artistic specialty: the Tornado.

Just to show you what that last diagram could look like with a little fancifying, our User Experience Lead, Bill, took a few minutes to whip up a new version:

Coooooooooool.

Aaron adds that Graffle is also a fantastic general purpose layout program for designing GUI mockups, and shares one more example of his with us:

The thing I love about Graffle is that you can do almost anything with it.  Yes, it is marketed as a diagramming program, but it's also fantastic for doing desktop publishing layouts.  It's also a very respectable vector graphics drawing program, giving people the ability to quickly create things that might otherwise take a lot more effort in Illustrator.  It's beautiful to see how open ended it is.  

Now, most of the time company use case articles don't include anything other than glowing praise for the app in question, but we know that in real life software isn't 100% perfect 100% of the time. I asked Aaron if there was anything he would add to OmniGraffle if he could, and here's what he suggested:

Although I used Graffle to take notes, it's not a note-taking program, and there are some features that I'd love to see OmniGraffle have that would make it more conducive to Graffle-wielding notetakers like myself.  First, I'd like to have the ability to record classes and meetings with OmniGraffle and have the sound sync up with the edits I'm making to the document.  This would effectively eliminate my need to copy and paste diagrams just to show a progression of edits, and it would have made studying a heck of a lot easier.  You'd just have to hit play, and you're off!  Another thing that would be really cool to see in Graffle would be interactive collaboration on documents in real time (think Google Wave).  Perhaps it's a little out there, but the tools Graffle gives me to make awesome stuff are fantastic, and it makes me want to use them everywhere!

Cool suggestions, Aaron, and they've been entered in the Official Omni Bug Tracking System Which Also Tracks Feature Requests. 

Aaron tells us that now that his student days are behind him, he still keeps OmniGraffle in his arsenal of tools. 

The software I work with often has extensive relationships between different records that are used to configure the software, and if I'm troubleshooting an issue, I fire up OmniGraffle and diagram it out so I can keep my wits about me. 

Our software helps an official problem solver keep his wits about him, how awesome is that? 

Aaron can be found on Twitter at @harpaa01. Thanks for sharing your story with us, Aaron!

Troy’s story: OmniGraphSketcher

Posted by Linda Sharps on 03.17.10 | 4 Comments

And we're back! With another installment of OMNI APPS—IN ACTION, which I have to say is almost as awesome of a title as my toddler's favorite DVD on the face of this earth, HORSES—CLOSE UP AND VERY PERSONAL. 

(Spoiler alert! The movie features horses.)

This week we've got a really interesting OmniGraphSketcher use case to share with you, thanks to Troy Payne, a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati. He's working on a grant for the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services, and is currently offering data analysis and problem solving services at no cost to small and medium-sized Ohio police departments. He writes,

Troy's team worked on different ways to visualize this information, beginning with a basic OmniGraphSketcher line chart that plotted raw counts for each year for which they had data (2006-2009) by month:

He goes on to explain,

OmniGraphSketcher to the rescue!

Hooray for robbery not increasing, right? Hooray for data visualization! 

Want to know how Troy created that chart? You're in luck, because he was nice enough to tell us:

Aw, man. We love happy customers SO MUCH. Thank you, Troy!