Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Designing Wireframes | Using Axure RP Pro

A lot many times when we are gathering the requirements from the customer or when we are transitioning the knowledge to the team or even brainstorming, we feel the need to create wireframes, either static or working wireframes for more clarity & bringing common understanding. In situations like these, we look back at our HTML experts or the graphics team to create some UI mockups, etc.


This involves a lot of discussions and exchange of ideas which need not get interpreted exactly we would want them to. Then as knowledge transitioner, we start developing frustration & would often exclaim to yourself - if I could do this myself, I would have had done it much better. I believe, lot of us have gone through such a phase at some point of time.

Let's talk about another scenario where we are expected to deliver prototypes in a very short timeline and we are hardpressed to work extra time, review, make modifications & come out with a refined output at the end of the wireframing exercise. Each time a situation like this arises, we dive into our regular development tools and usually (if not always) produce a half baked output which we expect our customers to sign-off on. Now, if the output itself is not complete, how a customer is going to provide a comprehensive feedback and all that we receive is changes, followed by a change request in the later stages of the development cycle.

Secondly, if the application (web or desktop) is UI intensive and a lot of focus needs to be levied on the usability aspects, an important aspect which is usually ignored, then it's the development team's onus to ensure that such aspects are discussed & finalized with the business users in advance. After all, no customer would want to see a change request being raised at a later stage when these changes could have been part of the original requirement itself. Some of us, as Project Managers & above, however tend to depend on Change Requests for revenues which is awful way of maintaining customer relationship.

What if we had a simple, intuitive & rapid development tool for creating wireframes, flows & prototypes? We would definitely want one for sure, right!! Once such tool which I noticed & tried is Axure RP Pro 5.6. Here is a short list of how it can help us in the situations discussed above -
  1. Easy to use interface which can be rearranged to suit your preferences.
  2. Automatically creates a 'Sitemap' which is easily manageable using right-click context menu.
  3. Easily convert a page from 'Wireframe' to a 'Flow'.
  4. Drag-n-drop 'Widgets' (objects or elements) to create your wireframes.
  5. Easily add 'Cases' (interactions or events) to the objects in the page; Axure presents a simple yet very extensive wizard to help you easily add required interactions.
  6. Add various UI elements like images, textfields, drop-down lists, tables, horizontal/vertical/tree menus, checkboxes, radio buttons & more..

    And of course, you can add cases/interactions to each of these elements using the wizard we discussed above.
  7. Manage size & other attributes using 'Layout & Size' panel located to the right side of the layout view.
  8. A MS Powerpoint-like feature called 'Masters', available to the left of the layout view, can also be created and applied to the pages ; a pretty time-saving feature for sure.
  9. Easily create 'Prototype' and/or 'Specification' as the final output; no need to spend additional effort on documentation, wow!!
  10. Share projects with team and work collaboratively.
Now you know the features, so what's next?
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