Navigation

You are here: Home > Prototyping

Tag Archives | Prototyping

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.

15

Enable Commenting on your Live Axure Prototypes

By on June 7, 2009 in Axure RP Pro, Prototyping, User Experience

I’ve started work­ing on a large project as part of a team of 5 peo­ple recently. Aside from doing the visual design, I’m work­ing on the UX strat­egy and infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture with an IA and UX designer from the US. We’re of course cre­at­ing most of our doc­u­men­ta­tion, user flows, wire­frames and pro­to­type in Axure RP Pro. He and I have been work­ing on the same project file using the new Shared Project fea­ture from Axure 5.x and col­lab­o­rat­ing on it through a free Subversion server (www​.myver​sion​con​trol​.com). That works very well and, once a day or some­times more often, I’ll gen­er­ate the Axure pro­to­type and FTP it to a pass­word pro­tected sub-​domain on my site so that other team mem­bers can con­sult it. There’s also other project file linked from a page in the pro­to­type. But there was one thing miss­ing from this process.

The thing is that, as of now, Axure pro­to­types do not han­dle com­ments on the project from other stake­hold­ers as some online pro­to­typ­ing appli­ca­tions like Protoshare do. But recently, I’ve dis­cov­ered a lit­tle script that enables us to inte­grate com­ments quite eas­ily using the free Protonotes ser­vice. That script is called Head Insert and has been devel­oped by another Axure enthu­si­ast named Joshua Morse. He orig­i­nally pub­lished ver­sion 1.2 in this blog post and recently updated the script to ver­sion 1.31 which can be found here.

What the script does is add a small bit of JavaScript code pro­vided by Protonotes when you signup (for free) to the head of each appro­pri­ate HTML file in the gen­er­ated Axure HTML pro­to­type. Then, when a user loads the pro­to­type in their browser, they can see com­ments added by oth­ers, edit/​reply to them and add their own through a tool­bar cre­ated through the Protonotes script. Using vari­ables in the script you can con­trol whether the tool­bar or the actual com­ments appear on page load by default. The com­ments them­selves are saved in a MySQL data­base on ProtoNotes’ server or, option­ally, on your own. It works very well and the great thing is that this is all free!

0

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.

0

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.

0

Axure RP Pro 5.5 Beta is Now Available

By on December 20, 2008 in Design & Development, Prototyping

The upcom­ing 5.5 ver­sion of Axure RP Pro has been made pub­lic and is avail­able for down­load. For any­one who’s been inter­ested by Axure and wanted to try it, now is a great time to do so. The beta is rock solid and, if I under­stand the fol­low­ing blog post on Axure’s site cor­rectly, it will expire only on February 28th which would give you quite a bit longer than a reg­u­lar 30 days trial to test it out. That’s a good thing since Axure is a pretty com­plex and pow­er­ful appli­ca­tion you have to spend a lit­tle time with to appreciate.

For more details includ­ing links to the down­load as well as to 3 blog posts describ­ing the new fea­tures in detail, see the following:

Axure RP Pro 5.5 Beta

0