Planning Your Maze with a Diagram

One way to plan an action maze or interactive case study is with a diagram. Although this can get unwieldy if your maze is large, it does provide you with an overview of the maze, an idea of how everything fits together, and a means for identifying blind alleys and loose ends.

An action maze consists of a series of screens, which provide textual and graphical information, and the links between them. The links on the page are buttons that represent the choices that users can make. The most logical way to develop a diagram of your maze is to draw a series of nodes (boxes, circles, whatever) and connect them with lines for the links. The lines should be labeled to show the decision, while text inside the nodes provides a brief description of what is shown there.

You have a variety of choices for drawing your maze while planning, besides paper and pencil. Here are some of the possibilities:

• SmartDraw (Free test download of inexpensive diagramming software)
• Inspiration (Free test download of inexpensive diagramming software)
• Visio (Trial CD of expensive diagramming software)