Web Mockups using Qt Designer

I teach a course in web usability and have been using a number of tools for the mockup assignments. We have used Visio, Denim, Mockup Screens and even PowerPoint! at various times but nothing has really worked well. I had taken a quick look at the osx development environment with the idea of demonstrating it as a UI builder.

This led me to looking at Ubuntu tools for designing user interfaces. We found Qt Designer and Glade and so installed them both.

First up was Qt Designer from Trolltech which was a blast. It has most of the widgets you want and an easy to use interface. Nice piece of work. The other neat thing is when you preview your form, not only to the widget work, but you get to choose which window manager look you want. We mainly choose windows and the result looks and acts like the interface you wish to demonstrate. Here is a silly example done in about 2 minutes just to get an idea of what could be done.

The end result is something you can demonstrate to end users so they can get an idea as to how the controls will work in the interface, so you can do usability testing on the design before starting the work of building the damn thing.

The linux version is really snappy and produces a nice looking form. However, our department is microsoft-centric so i needed to find a windows version, preferably free. It appears there is an older non commercial version which i downloaded from here. The Getting Started manual is on the Trolltech web site.

Tomorrow: install the windows version and see if it is any good.