Article written for TEQ Magazine April 2008
Coordination, if done with accuracy, can be key to a successful outcome on many levels. It is most difficult to facilitate coordination from disparate processes when each player has his own methods and time lines. Finding tools to help with this are rare. As interactive design problems become more complex, the teams that drive the solutions must evolve to meet those needs. Compounding this is the reality that is now common to be working with teams in other time zones and with people who speak different languages. Managing a coordinated effort is vital to the success of a project. For interactive solutions to be solved timely and precisely, they need to fit within multi-layered metaphors and support elegance and sophistication both visually and programmatically. Most importantly, the solutions need to support the goals of the sponsor, stakeholder, or business need. For all of this to work well, there is a need for a central system to bridge relationships between each independent group. If used strategically, I find a tool like Axure can play that vital role.
In my experience, Axure can work to satisfy the communication efforts between multi-faceted groups in a seamless way. Before I started working with Axure back in 2005 on the Hollywood.com redesign, I was using traditional tools like Visio, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver to capture my use cases and web simulations for user testing with Nielson Norman. The three rounds of intensive testing were mostly successful and my simulations worked well, but the process was laborious and time consuming. It had taken 5 months from start to finish (yes, you can mostly blame NNG for this) but naturally I wanted to expedite the process. So, I went searching for a tool to help in the user testing phase of a project. I found Axure by chance and after my first few hours with it, I knew I had a tool to not only help in rapid user testing, but one that would enable me to help bridge many of the efforts I was using other tools for. Not only could I quickly build wireframe simulations, but the ability to capture functional specifications at the object level and then produce a complete word document with all of this intact, automatically, sent me to IA nirvana.
Soon after my discovery, I showed my Director of IT a fully working simulation of one of his .NET modules. He had coded this module in the morning, and by the end of the day I had a fully working, interactive simulation based on his code, ready for first level user testing. He purchased the tool ten minutes after my presentation. We both were hooked and became very efficient collaborating together from that point forward, increasing our lifecycles by at least 30%. After a few years of daily usage with this tool, some best practices have emerged which I’d like to share.
What It Is Not
I will begin with what Axure does not do. It is not a tool that can export working production ready HTML. Although it may seem like it can, it cannot. It is not the best flowcharting tool. It has stencils to create flowcharts and use case scenarios in a crunch, but you soon revert back to standard tools like Visio, as it is, of course, more powerful. Axure does not have the ability to version control well (however, this may be addressed in future releases). If you have teams of IAs working together on simulations or wireframes it would be ideal to have check-in, check-out capabilities specific to users, much like Visual Source Safe, Subversion, or Harvest. It does not work on Mac OSX, since it is a .NET application and it appears they are not interested in pursuing the Macintosh option. I would suggest the developers of this application to port to Linux using Mono if at all possible. Axure will not change existing methods and protocols overnight within your organization, but it can be successfully introduced into an existing production process at any point, no matter how big or small your project may be.
Best Practice
After using Axure successfully with very aggressive deadlines, as well as in slower paced research environments, I have discovered many benefits this tool brings to the people involved. I enjoy IA as a career path because of the satisfaction I get from seeing people work together to build something. At first glance, this complexity seems impossible to build. The challenge in this is what drives me as an IA. Fine tuning efficiency is critical to making a project a success when it feels large and unmanageable. I find that the IA is not only there to build relationships between systems, but to build efficiencies between individual skill sets in order to reduce risk.
Where Axure shines is in the Agile/SCRUM development process, especially for remote team collaboration. From my experience, the Agile method morphs from team to team, but is the same in essence. It is in the iterative approach to software and web development that Axure works really well. When I start a project, I start at the 1.0 iteration. This is primarily a very low-level abstraction of the structure and navigation – I call this the XO document. As the fidelity increases and the Axure project grows into a more mature document, the iterative tracking of each instance of the project becomes very useful. I can go back to 1.4 or 2.4 of my document with ease. With HTML publishing built into Axure, I can publish to a live project blog where the client can track the history of the development (every client falls in love with this, by the way). In parallel to the publishing of the HTML prototype iteration, Axure can generate a Microsoft Word Document of the same interval which I save as a PDF for client download. This PDF is the main source of all client feedback, since they can add comments directly within the document. The client can explore the simulation, track, and comment on the functional specifications within the PDF. This is a great process for remote team coordination and Multilanguage constraints. There are times within a teleconference where I may choose to update the project blog in real-time and have the client refresh their browser to see live changes we just reviewed (clients love that too).
Summary
Axure is not a complete replacement to your standard design, documentation and development toolkit, but it is a fantastic way to aggregate these documents and share them quickly and effortlessly. For fast paced production environments where research and usability tends to be a gift and not a mandate, the more quickly you can get your product into a state for user reaction and engagement, the better. Axure can do this for you.
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I agree with what you say Dana. Axure it is a very good tool. I have one more point to add. One does not need any programming, Flash, HTML, or other skills to use it. Everyone can sketch ideas or illustrate what they want – Axure is relatively easy to learn to use for simple flat interfaces. Adding depth and interaction to simulations is more complex, requires a greater time investment, and will remains a professional designer activity.