Muse (Code Name)

So, Adobe’s latest creation is a high-powered WYSIWYG for designers – no coding required – called Muse (Code Name). I have been playing with it off and on for about a month – although no self respecting code snob would touch this with a ten-foot pole, right? Go on, look under the hood, you know you want to! Yes, it churns out a minimum of 10 billion divs per page. Icky.

But every once in a while I think it’s a good exercise for all of us to take off our “snob” filter and adopt what Buddhists call the mind of a beginner. The idea behind adopting a beginners mind is that you can’t teach an expert anything. If you’re an expert at tennis and your backhand suddenly stops working, it’s very hard to get it fixed. But a beginner has an easier time – this is how you hold the racket, this is how you swing, and they do it. That’s what went through my mind as I opened the Adobe Air application Muse, and here is what I learned.

I would never use it to design a website. But as a UX designer, I will pay for this product. The first thing I noticed was how easy it was to create a really cool sitemap as I laid out pages. Then I discovered the navigation widgets that let me create navigation that uh… works. In about a half an hour, I created an entire website that I’d been working on for the past several weeks. Not the finished website, but a working, clickable – obviously not finished visual design – get ready for it – rapid prototype.

I think Adobe got the marketing wrong for this product – or they missed a target audience for it at any rate. It needs some adjustments, like the ability to export the sitemap. But I think it’s an easier and more elegant solution to rapid prototyping than most other tools I’ve seen. Just resist the temptation to design the site visually and for crying out loud, don’t use the code!