Reviews: Product Reviews

Sitting around a table in Hamburg with three German Axure trainers from Ax-Stream, our three-day mission was to design a new Axure training course focusing on Responsive Web Design (RWD) using Axure 7’s adaptive features. Our goal was to produce an initial course design that we could pilot test with our other Axure trainers across Europe. More on that later!

We were working with an early beta version of Axure 7. Axure had asked us to review their new adaptive features and provide feedback regarding necessary improvements for its final release. In my prior discussions with Axure CEO, Victor Hsu, he had briefed me that Axure 7 would better address adaptive Web design than full RWD. For example, in keeping with earlier versions of Axure, there would be no support for liquid layouts, specifying positions and dimensions of Axure’s widgets—what some might call screen objects or components—using percentage values, or dynamic reflowing of text within widgets as the parent window gets resized. Read More

For the last 6 months, I have been using Microsoft Expression Blend as my primary design tool. Blend, shown in Figure 1, is quickly becoming a powerful product. Its new Sketchflow module had me at hello. Like any new tool, Blend requires some ramp up time. Plus, I had to consider how to use Blend within the design and development process where I work, because Blend is much more than a simple prototyping tool. Blend is a GUI development tool that can easily produce deployable code for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight platforms. As an interaction designer, I had to wonder, Do I really want to create production-ready code? There is no simple or correct answer to this question. It depends on your specific situation, the skills you possess, and ultimately, how you view your own role as an interaction designer within your organization. Read More

Almost three years ago, I wrote a review of Justinmind Prototyper as a user-interface design platform. While that review focused on Web application prototyping, in this review, I’ll describe Justinmind Prototyper’s support for mobile application prototyping and assess how well Prototyper integrates with usability testing applications.

As UX professionals, we often use prototyping tools to create low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes at different stages of an application design process. Stakeholders need to be able to participate in the creation of those prototypes and review and provide feedback on them. More important, we need to test applications with the help of prototyping tools. However, most prototyping tools lack effective responsiveness where mobile application design, gestural interactions, and usability testing come into play. Read More