Victor's Blog

Why we love what we do...

2006-08-31T18:03:00Z

It really makes our day when we hear from customers telling us how helpful Axure RP has been for their work. Here was an email we received yesterday. This one was a little unique because Darryl is more of a programmer/developer than a UI/application designer... (believe it or not, our marketing team did not write this :)

Dear Axure,

I have used your software for a month and it is wonderful.

Before this software my only page mock ups were done painfully and slowly in Word, VS.NET, Front Page or other tools just not made for this kind of work. Not only did it take forever to do this, but they looked plain awful and I could not portray any sort of page flow or an overall site perspective. Everything was basically flat screen shots.

Axure enabled me to develop a 40+ page interactive site prototype in one day. Not only is it fast to develop a site mock-up, but the software is a joy to use and very thoughtfully and intuitively designed (I say this as a software designer myself). This software just feels right. Plus,
Using "masters" and templates makes for what I would describe as an object oriented prototyping tool. I love how I can change one master and have the enhancemnent ripple through all the other pages.

Best of all, I can deliver much richer and descriptive designs to my clients, enabling them to understand better what we will eventually deliver, make sure we get it right during design time and NOT have to fix things later, and making it easier for my developers to know what to do once the real work starts.

I'm normally a database/programmer-oriented person. UI and page design are not my strongest skills. So if I can use this software, then a webmaster/creative type would find it a breeze to use.

Finally, in all the time I have used Axure, I have not experienced a single bug or glitch.

Once again, I love this software. We just bought five licenses for our company.

Feel free to add this to your testimonal page.

Darryl Hopkins
Technical Director
Avectra
http://www.avectra.com

Coming soon: Flows, OnPageLoad, Foreign Characters

2006-05-30T18:30:00Z

Here is a preview of a few of the features that are coming soon to Axure RP Pro.

The first is flow diagrams. There have been many requests to add flow diagramming capabilities (http://axure.com/CS/forums/thread/267.aspx) to Axure RP. Currently, to include flow diagrams in the prototypes and specifications, Axure RP users have been copying and pasting flow diagrams from diagramming tools like Visio into Axure RP. This feature will allow users to create flow diagrams in Axure RP and creates some opportunities for tighter integration between flow diagrams and wireframes in future releases.

The second is OnPageLoad. This feature is being developed primarily as a means to set dynamic panels states when a page is loaded (http://axure.com/CS/forums/thread/195.aspx). In addition, it sets the stage for setting variables, passing variables from page to page in the prototype, and responding to the variable values.

The third is support for foreign characters in the prototypes. As more and more international customers adopt Axure RP, the need for this feature has increased (http://axure.com/CS/forums/thread/291.aspx). The umlaut issue discussed in that forum post is being fixed in a minor release, but this feature will also support cyrillic, chinese, arabic, etc.

We are targeting a July '06 beta for these features with a release in August. Keep an eye out!

Oh Visio!

2006-02-23T07:10:00Z

A few months ago an article called Storyboarding Rich Internet Applications With Visio written by Bill Scott was published on Boxes and Arrows, a popular Information Architecture site.

In the article, Bill goes through an example of using Visio to design an inline editor for changing photo titles in a photo manager. The end result is that you can double-click on each step in a storyboard diagram to show layers of the diagram representing the various states of the inline editor. Cool stuff.

I thought it would be interesting to prototype the design in Axure RP 4. I created the inline editor using a dynamic panel and created the editor with an image as a master. I repeated the master on the Home page to better represent what the experience would be like in the actual application. After doing that, I noticed that editing a title caused the save and cancel buttons to overlap with the image to the right. Usability issue? Maybe, maybe not, but it made me think twice about the design.

You can download the file here or view the prototype here. The prototype was designed for changing the title to "Water lilies" as described in the annotation on the Save button.

How do YOU say Axure?

2006-02-22T06:49:00Z

Azure?
Assure?
Azoor?
Ack-soor?

We've heard them all, and as long as you're talking about Axure, we're happy!

We like to say ak shûr ... an Ack followed by the word "sure".

Hope you're all enjoying beta 2. It is feature complete, the bug reports are minimal (so far), and the response has been great so we're on track for a March release.

Decisions... decisions

2006-02-08T01:56:00Z

I was recently asked by a potential customer to compare Axure RP to comparable products, and in my response I described some of the principles on which we base our design and marketing decisions. I thought it would be a good first blog post to share those with you and provide some insight into the type of products and company we are building.

Here is an excerpt from my response:

Axure RP was designed and developed with a focus on building a usable tool that would make it easier, faster, and more effective for people to do their work. This applies not only to our customers, but to their customers and the people they work with as well. This is reflected in features in Axure RP including the familiar interface, masters (references and templates), wireframe editing features, and support for viewing prototypes in popular browsers without a player.

We also want Axure RP to be easy to adopt and used widely across a large user base because we believe this will add value for Axure RP customers and help us make it a better product based on a larger set of customer experiences. Our focus on easy adoption can be seen in things like our try and buy model, the low learning curve, the price point, and support for generating the specification with versions of Word down to 2000.

This is contrary to some traditional RM solutions that are frequently viewed as difficult to learn and use and oftentimes sold through a sales team to management and then rarely used or used begrudgingly by the team.

We also think that each piece of the solution should be available separately and work together seemlessly. The initial release of Axure RP contained project info, requirements management, flow diagramming, interface design, prototyping, and specifications. What we found was that although the integration was attractive, each piece was not necessarily the best of breed and the flexibility to choose a preferred tool for each task was important to our customers.

And finally, we think managers and teams should have the freedom to define the process that works best for them and for their specific projects. There is no one process that works for every team and project, and the tools should not impose one. If your project requires flow diagramming, then do it, if not, then don’t.

For future posts I plan on writing about prototyping, other process topics, and product plans... tune in!