Book Image

Axure RP 6 Prototyping Essentials

By : Ezra Schwartz
Book Image

Axure RP 6 Prototyping Essentials

By: Ezra Schwartz

Overview of this book

Wireframes, interactive prototypes, and UX specifications are among the fundamental deliverables of every UX project. They are also the most labor and time intensive to produce due to constant changes in business requirements. Given these circumstances, Axure is quickly taking over as the preferred tool for prototyping. However, prototyping in Axure is strikingly different from the conventional method of producing static wireframes and to rapidly develop interactive prototypes in Axure, you'll need to have a good understanding of the tool and its features.Whether you are an individual practitioner or a member of a UX team, a consultant, or an employee, this book will teach you how to use Axure, one of the leading UX tools. You will learn to use Axure for producing top-quality deliverables and tackling the demands of rapid iterative UX projects of any complexity and size, and for any platform and device.Axure RP 6 Prototyping Essentials takes a very pragmatic approach to showing you how to use Axure and produce impressive deliverables while saving labor and time. You may not be in a position to change how projects are scheduled, budgeted, and managed, but you can be more creative and productive by mastering one of the leading UX tools in the market. After an initial introduction to Axure's user interface, terminology, and features, this book walks you through a medium-size UX project: a digital library that sells books, newspapers, and movies. Although some aspects of the prototyping process are simplified for the sake of clarity and efficiency, the demo project is an opportunity to discuss in context and in sequence topics such as addressing business and technical requirements, handling use cases and flow diagrams, low and high fidelity wireframe construction, interactivity, writing annotations, generating detailed UX specifications, and traceability. For the most part, Axure 6 RP Prototyping Essentials can be read in sequence or used as a reference guide.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Axure RP 6 Prototyping Essentials
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The Axure workspace


Axure's workspace is straightforward, as seen in the following screenshot:

Your main wireframing construction space is the Wireframe pane (A), which is at the center of the screen, flanked by supporting panes on the left, right, and bottom:

Left panes:

  • The Sitemap pane (B)

  • The Widgets Pane (C)

  • The Masters pane (D)

Right panes:

  • The Widget Properties pane (E)

  • The Dynamic Panel Manager (F)

Bottom pane:

  • The Page Properties pane (G)

The menu bar (H) and toolbar (I) complete the composition on the top.

The preceding screenshot is a Windows version. The Mac version of Axure (see the following screenshot) is nearly identical; except the menu bar (A) and the appearance of the toolbar (B), variations that stem from the difference in how toolbars are implemented on Windows versus OS-X:

Think of the various panes as lenses that allows you to switch your view from a macro perspective of the project to a micro perspective of a widget.

  • Project level perspective: The top-most level is that...