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Better Defaults v2 Axure RP Library Released

By on April 7, 2010 in Axure RP Pro, Interaction Design, Prototyping, User Experience

My friend Loren Baxter who is an Interaction Designer and UX Engineer and owns the site “A Clean Design” has just released ver­sion 2.0 of his fan­tas­tic “Better Defaults” library of wid­gets for Axure RP 5.5 and higher. Continue Reading →

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Now is a Good Time to be a Fireworks Evangelist

By on June 19, 2009 in Adobe, Design & Development, Fireworks, Interaction Design, Prototyping

I could not imag­ine my cre­ative process with­out Adobe Fireworks. I have been using that appli­ca­tion since ver­sion 2.0 some­time in 1999. 10 years ago, Fireworks was not an obvi­ous choice but the work­flow advan­tages over Photoshop were imme­di­ately evi­dent to me and my cre­ative process never was the same. Unfortunately, it took almost all those years for Fireworks to be taken seri­ously in the indus­try. Being a Fireworks evan­ge­list 5 or 6 years ago felt like preach­ing in the desert. But not anymore.

Today, Fireworks is finally thriv­ing. After a cou­ple false starts and dud ver­sions (yes I’m look­ing at you Fireworks 8 and CS2!), ver­sions CS3 and CS4 have finally brought Fireworks to a level where many indus­try heavy­weights are now pay­ing atten­tion. It is also cross­ing over into new fields like User Experience and Interaction Design where many prac­ti­tion­ers who are not tra­di­tional Web design­ers (read visual/​graphic design­ers) use Fireworks for rapid pro­to­typ­ing and quickly iter­at­ing inter­face and inter­ac­tion designs.

It is an excit­ing time for Fireworks which proves that Adobe’s deci­sion to keep it alive after acquir­ing Macromedia was the right one. Not only that but the appli­ca­tion itself has finally started to really improve again after stag­nat­ing for a few years under Macromedia’s watch. There are new books being writ­ten about it or with chap­ters about it, new (and not so new) Web sites cov­er­ing how to use it or who is using it. Can’t wait to see what’s in store in Fireworks’ future.

If you have never tried it, do your­self a favor and do so. If you are com­ing from Photoshop, leave your pixel push­ing Photoshop mind­set at the door and embrace Fireworks vec­tor based work­flow. Regardless of Fireworks’ very capa­ble bitmap edit­ing tools, its real strength lies in its hybrid work­flow based on a vec­tor based core. Until you really give it a try, you will never know how much dif­fer­ence work­ing in a vec­tor based envi­ron­ment does for any kind of lay­out work.

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Rapid Prototyping Tools and Principles

By on March 24, 2009 in Axure RP Pro, Design & Development, Fireworks, Interaction Design, Prototyping

Dan Harrelson from Adaptive Path has writ­ten a very inter­est­ing blog post titled Rapid Prototyping Tools and what makes good pro­to­types. My long time favorite Adobe Fireworks is men­tionned along with Axure RP Pro (which is a newer tool in my arse­nal) but also sev­eral oth­ers includ­ing online tools like Balsamiq Mockups.

What is most inter­est­ing to me in the post is the first part before he lists the tools and where he explains the prin­ci­ples of good pro­to­typ­ing and why it should be done in the first place. For me, this comes fol­low­ing a very well received pre­sen­taion at the IA Summint 2009 from Fred Beecher titled Integrating Effective Prototyping Into Your Design Process and which I fol­lowed through live tweet­ing as I couldn’t attend.

Both Harrelson and Beecher press the impor­tant point that cre­at­ing inter­ac­tive pro­to­types helps us design bet­ter user expe­ri­ences as they help val­i­date a design direc­tion early in the process before invest­ing a lot of money and effort into design or devel­op­ment solu­tions that may not yield the best results possible.

I strongly sug­gest you take a look at Dan Harrelson’s blog post and go through Fred’s pre­sen­ta­tion slides. They may put you on a track to improve your own process and deliver bet­ter solu­tions to your clients.

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Axure RP Pro 5.5 Has been Released

By on February 26, 2009 in Design & Development, Interaction Design, Prototyping

The new ver­sion 5.5 of Axure RP Pro has been released a cou­ple days ago after being in pub­lic beta for a few months. It’s a very sig­nif­i­cant upgrade in terms of new fea­tures and is free for exist­ing cus­tomers with a cur­rent license.

Noteworthy fea­tures include the abil­ity to load and cre­ate exter­nal wid­get libraries (sim­i­lar to Visio sten­cils for exem­ple) that can be shared with cowork­ers or other Axure users. The new ver­sion ships with a bunch of libraries based on the Yahoo Design Patterns Library.

Other improve­ments include changes to the design envi­ron­ment like the addi­tion of a size and loca­tion panel directly in the UI, a Dynamic Panels man­ager palette and more. Check the changelog for all the details and down­load the new ver­sion here.

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Discussion on Standards for Axure Design Librairies on Axlib

By on November 13, 2008 in Design & Development, Interaction Design

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!

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