Designing the user experience has never been more exciting and prototyping it has never been more challenging. Prototyping is the single most cost-effective means to track usability problems before you begin investing in visual design or coding, and Axure RP 7 is the industry's foremost prototyping tool.
This detailed, practical primer on Axure 7.0 is a complete rewrite of the previous edition due to the numerous new features in Axure 7.0. The demand for skilled Axure professionals is high, and familiarity with Axure is an expected prerequisite for UX designers worldwide. Short on jargon and high on methods and best practices, packed with real-life scenarios and step-by-step guidance through hands-on examples, this book will help you integrate Axure into your UX workflow.
Chapter 1, Prototyping Fundamentals, covers the Axure option, project-level forecasting, a weighted checklist for UX projects, Axure construction strategy checklist, its usage in various project types, and tips for using Axure on large projects.
Chapter 2, Axure Basics – the User Interface, explains file formats and workspace. It also covers the wireframe, Sitemap, Masters, Widgets, Widget Interactions and Notes, Page Properties, and Widget Manager panes. It further explains adaptive views, repeater, Web Fonts, toolbar, and menu bar.
Chapter 3, Prototype Construction Basics, covers device/OS-agnostic frameworks, objectives and artifacts, naming and labeling conventions, requirements, use cases, flow diagrams, navigation, masters, dynamic panels, and visual effects.
Chapter 4, Creating Basic Interactions, covers Axure interactions, events, cases, and actions.
Chapter 5, Advanced Interactions, covers conditions, raised events, and variables.
Chapter 6, Widget Libraries, covers masters and widget libraries, built-in libraries, community libraries, creating your own widget library, managing libraries, and managing visual design patterns.
Chapter 7, Managing Prototype Change, covers change readiness checklist, estimating your work, rollbacks with Team Projects, custom styles, style painter, alignment with visual design, guides, and grids.
Chapter 8, UI Specifications, covers configuring page notes and annotation fields, annotation strategy, and configuring specifications generators.
Chapter 9, Collaboration, covers team projects, best practices for teams, and AxShare.
Appendix, Practitioners' Corner, discusses a survey that was conducted among Axure users, troubleshooting guidelines, and construction tutorials.
To follow the demo project in this book and to experiment on your own, you will need the following:
Axure 7 is available for Windows and Mac. To experiment with Axure's Team Project feature and with generating Word specifications, Axure 7 Pro is required. You can download a free, 30-day evaluation copy from www.Axure.com, and the company is very generous in extending the trial period. For latest list of system requirements to run Axure on either platform, check out Axure's website.
For specifications, MS Word 2000 or newer for Windows and MS Word 2004 or newer for Mac.
Chrome, in both platforms, is the recommended browser. Firefox is fine as well.
This book is intended for:
UX practitioners, business analysts, product managers, and others involved in UX projects
Consultants or in-house staff who work for agencies and corporations
Individual practitioners or UX team members
UX practitioners who seek to deliver a higher value in a fraction of the time involved in wireframing and annotating with traditional techniques based on drawing tools
UX practitioners who want to dramatically improve their productivity and skills with expertise in delivering rich, interactive prototypes and extensive specifications instead of static documents
The book assumes that the user has either little or no familiarity with Axure. Perhaps you are evaluating the tool for an upcoming project or are required to quickly get up to speed in a project you just joined.
The book assumes familiarity with the principles of the user-centered design methodology.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "By default, the .rp files are stored into the root Documents/Axure folder."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Once you have installed Axure and launched it, you are presented with the Welcome to Axure RP Pro 7.0 window."
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You can download the demo files for this book at http://prototypingessentials.weebly.com.
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