I find Marshal McLuhan's insight to be especially intriguing in the context of tools that help us conceptualize and express user experience. In fact, my motivation to write this book has been shaped by my personal experience with Axure, since I started using it back in 2007.

What struck me then, and continues to excite me today, was the freedom to design, test, iterate, and present fully-clickable interactive prototypes. I did not need a developer. I did not need to spend months to learn a programming or authoring language. It was easy, fast, and fun. As someone who does user experience for a living, Axure afforded me my own user experience.

Within a few hours, I had my first prototype running, and since that day, I never looked back, and have since rarely used Visio, my previous wireframing tool. I also realized that, in addition to being able to create interactive prototypes, Axure helped me deal with a major chore—creating and updating the user interface functional specifications document.

If you ever created a specifications document the traditional way by using Visio, Word, and a screen capture utility, you know the drill—a tedious process that involves adding footnote tags to Visio wireframes, taking screenshots of these wireframes, saving them, importing them to Word, and finally, writing the relevant annotations. If you update the wireframe, you have to retake the screen capture, save, replace its version in Word, and update the annotations. Multiply this process by the number of wireframes in your project, and the magnitude of the effort becomes clear and daunting.

As the UX design is inherently an iterative process, the specifications update process is a real drain of time, money, and energy, which is bad for everyone involved in the project. With Axure's integrated specifications, I found an innovative approach that reduces, greatly, the manual process. Axure numbers the annotations on the wireframes, takes the screenshots, and organizes the entire content in a customizable layout. While configuring the specifications document takes some experimentation, the effort pales in comparison to the manual process. Moreover, once you are happy with the way the specifications generator works, you no longer need to deal with it.

Axure's support for team collaboration was an important enhancement that helped cement its adaptation among UX professionals, because it underscored the dramatic shift in the perception of UX among business stakeholders, as critical to the success of software projects. As any sizable project requires multiple UX resources, collaboration has become a prerequisite that Axure addresses with its Shared Projects feature.

As I started to use Axure, I occasionally stumbled on technical issues or had questions I could not figure out. Responses were prompt and detailed, files I sent for checkups were reviewed and issues explained, and occasionally, immediate follow-up of software updates that fixed bugs I mentioned. This dedication to customer support has been, and continues to be, by far, the deepest I have ever encountered.

I also discovered an incredibly helpful and responsive community of fellow users worldwide, on Axure's Discussion Forum. Typically, you can get a helpful response to your query within hours and people are generous with their expertise. Over the years, as I gained some expertise with the tool, it has been nice to be able to help others in the forum. I will admit that this level of support is very important to me. When a tool becomes critical to my work, it has a direct impact on my livelihood. Support feels like a lifeline in times of crisis, and knowing that such a level of support exists, plays a major role in my loyalty and tolerance.

Axure's value was so compelling that I was able to convince clients and team members to approve the use of the tool, back when it was far less known among UX practitioners. This UX-centric integrated environment for wireframing, specifications, and collaboration also carried a price tag that was a small fraction of the cost and implementation complexities of enterprise tools. Occasionally, clients would raise a concern about the ability to find UX resources who know how to use Axure. UX designers would raise a concern about switching from tools they were very familiar with to a new tool. These two perspectives can potentially feed each other in a loop, which makes it difficult to effect change. It really takes external pressures to drive change.

Indeed, the growth of Axure's popularity among UX designers paralleled two important trends: The solidification of UX as an integrated part of the overall software development process, and technological advances that afforded the creation of rich user experiences. As more companies recognized the business value of modern user experience, budgets opened up, and with them, the demand for UX professionals.

With increased demand came also the pressures to deliver on time and within budget, both often aggressive to absurdity. At a certain point, too-ambitious schedules create serious friction with core principles of user-centered design, an inherently time consuming methodology that calls for contextual research, iterative design, and user validation. I realized, as many others did, that on top of helping me produce excellent deliverables on a tight schedule, Axure is helping me stay profitable, because I can deliver a lot more value to my clients, in less time and less sweat.

This is an important point. At the end of the day, design agencies and independent consultants need to turn a profit in order to stay viable. It is impossible to stay viable for long, if you have to double and triple your working hours just to keep up with the pressure of constant updates to a prototype and specifications. In-house UX teams must also control their cost and increase their productivity. Axure helps maintain profitability, because it is relatively easy to master, and it affords substantial efficiencies through clever use of customizable patterns, templates, and automation.

In conclusion, and reflecting back on McLuhan's observation earlier in this chapter, Axure is a tool that has been shaped by UX designers over the course of nearly a decade. At the time of writing this book, it is widely used, with over 30,000 licensed copies world wide, running on Mac and Windows. Axure is probably the de facto UX design tool in our industry. To what degree does it shape its users? It is for each of us to discover.

In this chapter, we introduce a prototyping checklist that covers the diverse set of variables that are involved in user experience projects, and how your approach to constructing an Axure project file might be affected by the specifics of your own project. Also, in the spirit of User Centered Design , and because UX projects are a collaborative effort, I thought it will be valuable to include the insights and expectations of real people who've experienced work on UX projects in various roles ranging from business, project management, visual design and development, as well as other user experience practitioners.