Microsoft Viso
Visio is a part
of the Microsoft Office suite of applications that is designed for making
complex diagrams, such as flow charts or in the context of Information
Architecture wireframes for planning the structure of a website. It uses vector
graphics which means that any diagrams created should be scalable without any
loss of quality, perfect for giving presentations, for example, which gives it
an advantage over using other graphics software such as Adobe Photoshop or
Fireworks, and has many more specific functions. One of the main advantages of
using Visio as opposed to other diagramming software is that is shares a common
interface with the other applications in the Microsoft Office Suite, and
therefore much less of a learning curve is required to start using the
software, if one is familiar with Office, which is generally the case, given
the suite's ubiquity within most organisations. This is a major advantage where
collaboration is essential, for example, where an Information Architect must
share receive input from clients, designers, creaters of content to be placed
on the site and so on, since it really only requires that a version of Office
that includes Visio is installed, rather than specialised software that the
other contributors wouldn't neccessarily need. Other important features that
are of use to the Information Architect are the project planning elements,
meaning timelines and dates for implementation for features planned in the
wireframes are integrated neatly into the project. Visio will also aid the
analysis of existing sites, by listing links and identifying broken ones, and
identifying changes in the site since it was last diagrammed by Visio. Visio
also aids with databases, in that it can reverse engineer a database and
diagram a model of the database, thus aiding two important elements in
Information Architecture, structure of information on a website and structure
of information within a database. Visio should be considered an importnat tool
in the initial planning stages of a website, which is clearly highly importnat
to the Information Architect, and its interoperability with other products is a
key point that puts it at an advantage over some other diagramming tools.