A new Boulder startup called Intuitect launched its first product (Intuitect Professional) yesterday. The product helps professional web designers develop the user interface for complex sites, eliminating much of the tedium they face. Intuitect Professional retails for $495.00.
Having only built piddly little websites, I knew very little about this world until I sat down for an Izze with one of the founders, Jason Williams. Jason explained to me that complex web sites (think of something like Ford.com) are not just banged out in DreamWeaver. With high end sites, specialized information architects often get involved first to map out the user interface, workflows, and interactions that need to occur on the site. Basically, they’re creating the site map well in advance of the look and feel. The tool of choice for information architects is Visio, according to Jason.
“Intuitect was born of frustration. As information architecture and user experience practitioners, we were confounded by the time we wasted creating, updating, and synchronizing multiple visualizations of the same project. The reason Intuitect Professional is so revolutionary is because it provides information architects and interaction designers (user experience designers) the capability to store all of their project data in one application. Visio has become the professional information architects tool of choice because it allow users to create schematic representations of sitemaps, wireframes and flowmaps. While Visio is a powerful tool it is too general for IAs and Intuitect Professional naturally extends Visios functionality to store all project data and keeps a single data structure for the website project.” – Founder, Jason Williams.
From this Visio based site map, Intuitect has the ability to directly spit out a navigable prototype. This makes the information architects life much easier, and saves time for the whole team as feedback comes in and design iteration occurs. Jason likens this efficiency boost to a CAD system being able to spit out an prototype of a new Honda Accord without the need to physically build an intermediate prototype: “A 50 page website, even a prototype, can easily take a week to build. With Intuitect Professional it takes a few seconds and all the monotonous work is done for you.”
Jason is the President and CTO of Intuitect, and is a veteran software developer. His co-founder is Fred Leise who is considered one of the countrys foremost Information Architects.
Intuitect recently closed an initial round of funding. The source and amount were undisclosed.
