Fireworks for Agile Teams
by Kylie Tuosto
Now that interaction design is a widely recognized discipline, we have a plethora of tools and applications to choose from to manage our daily work. From Sketch, to Photoshop, to Fireworks, to Axure you can pretty much knock out a design in no time if you know what you're doing. At Intuit we need a system that not only works for interaction designers, but allows our fellow XD partners (like writers and researchers) and our product manager and developer partners to work as seamlessly as possible.
Since the interaction and visual design team uses Fireworks for all work-in-progress mocks and final assets, I crafted this workshop as a crash course for our cross-functional partners to learn how to use the tool. For writers, it eliminated the back-and-forth of storing final copy in text documents. For product managers, it eliminated unnecessary exports of assets/layers. For developers, it created instantaneous access to assets. And it empowered researchers to jump into the prototyping process and create click-throughs from existing mockups.
No matter what tools you use as a designer, it's important to bring your cross-functional teammates up to speed. They don't need to know how to do everything you do, but they do need a basic working knowledge of the tool so that they aren't alienated from the process or overly-reliant on you for things they could do themselves. Ultimately this workshop helped our entire team be more agile by blurring role boundaries and allowing everyone to get work done fast!
