What to use for rapidly generating HTML prototypes from concept model diagrams to test interactive search.

I believe CogTool can do what you want.

Although CogTool started life as a tool for making predictions of
skilled behavior on interfaces, it has evolved into a rapid prototyping
tool that generates HTML and, oh, BTW, gives you predictions of skilled
execution time at a touch of a button.

To make your conceptual models, you would have two options.

1. Make a storyboard directly in CogTool, using our widget palette
(including some really easy tools for making hierarchical menus,
context menus, radio button sets, etc.) and connecting the pages
simply by drawing transitions from widgets to other pages. This
storyboarding technique was inspired by Landay's DENIM.
2. Sketch your conceptual pages by hand on paper or whiteboard and
scan them in or take digital pictures of them and import them into
CogTool. Then stick widgets on and draw the transitions in the
storyboard.

Either way, you just Export Design to HTML and your get the static pages
you want, all connected together.
Change the design, choose the Export to HTML menu item again, and
everything gets regenerated.

CogTool is free, open source, works on Mac and Windows (XP and Vista),
and can be downloaded from
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~bej/cogtool/download.html

And, oh, BTW, if you pay attention to choosing the widgets that actually
represent the content of your system, you will get predictions of
skilled execution time in case that might be an important metric in
addition to your user tests.

I have to admit that we have tested the storyboarding and cognitive
modeling portions of CogTool more than we have tested the HTML
generation, but if you find bugs and send reports to us, we have
programmers who can fix them pretty quickly.

If you like it, please let me know,
Bonnie
HCI Institute
Carnegie Mellon University

Michael Long wrote:
> Anyone know of a tool that can generate static, linked html pages from
> a concept model diagram? The tool needs to be a concept model diagram
> creation tool that generates individual html pages that are linked
> together. The goal being that if you were to reorganize the concept
> model diagram, the tool can regenerate html pages with the new links.
> This is needed for rapidly creating HTML prototypes in order to test
> interactive search.
>
> Thanks.
>
> - Michael
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