Discussion on Standards for Axure Design Librairies on Axlib

As I men­tioned in my recent “My Top 10 Web Design Tools” post, I have started using Axure RP Pro for cre­at­ing highly inter­ac­tive pro­to­types, wire­frames, site maps , flow charts and spec­i­fi­ca­tions. It is a fan­tas­tic appli­ca­tion with a lot of depth that can cre­ate very com­plex prototypes.

Axure also has a grow­ing com­mu­nity around it and, in recent months, sev­eral peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions have started to cre­ate libraries of reusable com­po­nents that ease the effort of cre­at­ing sim­ple or com­plex inter­ac­tive wid­gets from scratch in Axure. A list of the best of these resources recently has been pub­lished on A Clean Design’s site and can be found here: http://​www​.acle​an​design​.com/​2​0​0​8​/​1​1​/​t​h​e​-​t​o​p​-​1​0​-​a​x​u​r​e​-​r​e​s​o​u​r​c​es/

One of those resources is the open source Axlib project who’s aim is “to cre­ate a robust design library of com­mon inter­ac­tion pat­terns for use with Axure RP”. Axlib is both a Google Group as well as a Google Code repos­i­tory for the lat­est ver­sion of the librairy. The rea­son I men­tion Axlib specif­i­cally is that there’s a great con­ver­sa­tion going on now in the Google group about how those open-​source Axure librairies should be stan­dard­ized both in terms of how they are cre­ated and doc­u­mented and any­one involved in UXD that is using Axure or is inter­ested in using it at some point should par­tic­i­pate. Some of the issues under dis­cus­sion include:

• Width of wid­gets (assumed page width, perhaps)
• General look and feel, per­haps a sim­ple color palette
• Level of fidelity
• Level of interactivity
• Use and doc­u­men­ta­tion of Variables
• Use and doc­u­men­ta­tion of Raised Events
• Fonts and font size

If you are an Axure user, give this and other librairies a try and get involved in the community!