Cast your mind back a little while to the release of Adobe Muse – the tool that lets you ‘design and publish HTML websites without writing code’. Now fast forward about 90 seconds to when the barrage of abuse (mostly..) was flung fourth by the web community via twitter. Well – big news today. I may just have found a genuinely good use for Muse – wireframing!
Before I go on it’s very important to note that I have tried loads of wireframing tools in the past year. From Mockups, Mockingbird and Mockflow right through to Axure, and a dozen more along the way. I found faults with each of them; be it a poor interface, lack of flexibility, lack of master pages or simply a poor quality output.
What I found with mockups is that you can very quickly build clickable wireframes through a beautifully lightweight yet fairly comprehensive Adobe Air based platform. Further to that, publishing to the web is painless, as Adobe are piggybacking on BusinessCatalyst (another Adobe Product).
Rather than this post being all talk, I felt the best thing to do was to time myself and spend a mere 30 of her majesties finest minutes building a very simple, clickable wireframe in Muse. I guess the results speak for themselves:
http://storm-wireframe.businesscatalyst.com
The best bit is that Muse is currently free, including the hosting. So if you want to have a play I’d wholeheartedly recommend it.
So what do you think? Does Muse provide quick and easy wireframing or is it just another in the long list of ‘not quite’ tools?
