Designer's Toolbelt: Axure
The Pittsburgh local IxDA group held their first programmed event last night. Their were approximately ten of us in attendance, meeting in the Viz (General Dynamics C4 Systems) office space. We were treated to two demonstrations by our members Julie Carlini of Thermo Fisher Scientific and David Bishop of Maya. Julie presented Axure, a tool for prototyping and specifying user interfaces, while David presented Adobe Illustrator as Maya uses for the same purposes.
I was interested in seeing Axure, as many have recommended it on the IxDA list. However, I did not have high hopes. With my background in Graphic Design, I require robust graphical tools. I expect fine control of typography and complete freedom in layout. As I suspected, Axure cannot deliver in these areas. It provides basic grid layout for wireframes and screen mockups. It’s obviously geared toward website design. It provides two capabilities of value beyond what I have using Freehand and Photoshop: the ability to create links and generate a navigable HTML prototype with interactive form widgets, and the ability to add notes and metadata to objects that are used to generate a MS Word specification document. While these may be considered valuable time-savers to Interaction Designers that don’t work past the wireframing stage, they are not good enough for my purposes.
For one thing, I use hand-drawn sketches rather than wireframes. I prefer to integrate visual design and interaction design, rather than separating them into two different steps performed by two different people with two different skill sets. I believe this results in a more coherent design. From pencil sketches, I move to high-fidelity renderings of the screens. Axure will not support me in this process. As for a working prototype, I could link my sketches together as quickly in Director or Dreamweaver. Finally, the generated Word document is wholly inadequate. My specifications documents are very clear and precise with arrows pointing to widgets in the screen renderings, and sometimes with markup indicating dimensions and colors. My documents are designed to be easily read and understood. Axure’s documents were poorly formatted tables with references to numbers placed on the screenshots.
To top it off, Axure is only available for Windows. That’s a show-stopper for me.
In conclusion, I have no doubt it is better than using Visio, but then I wouldn’t touch Visio with a ten foot pole.