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

Chapter 8. Functional Specifications

The UX functional specifications document is a communications tool: It is written in a formal way by which the interaction designer prescribes to the developers the desired behavior of the user interface. If you need to deliver such a document, your takeaways from this chapter should be the following:

  • Seek the development team's input and approval on the format and scope of the specifications, as early in the project as possible

  • Estimate early, and correctly, the effort involved in creating and generating the specifications

  • Start planning and testing the specifications output when you start your Axure file and continue testing and tweaking the output throughout the project

The tendency to postpone dealing with the specifications until later in the project is natural. After all, the document is typically due at the conclusion of UX activities for the project, and other more pressing tasks on the UX plate take priority. Consequently, the UI specifications document...