Fred Beecher and Lori Baker
Abstract
Axure RP Pro is a rapid prototyping tool that allows user experience practitioners to wireframe, document, prototype, and test a wide range of interactions. The purpose of this workshop is to quickly give attendees basic competency with the tool.
To accomplish this, the workshop is structured around a series of exercises in which attendees use the skills they are learning to wireframe a basic HTML Web site. As the workshop goes on, attendees will return to these wireframes a number of times, using new skills to add interactivity, generate a prototype, and generate printed documentation.
Workshop Details
The specific topics the instructor will cover are:
- Axure concepts and UI environment
- Detailed information about most of the built-in widgets (those widgets facilitating rich interactions are not covered in this workshop)
- Creating flow diagrams
- Adding interactivity to your wireframes
- Annotating your wireframes
- Using masters to decrease re-work
- Configuring how prototypes are generated
- Configuring how printed documentation is generated
Interactive prototyping is all about smoke and mirrors, and to make that work well requires planning. This workshop will also teach attendees the most effective strategies for planning an Axure prototyping project. Planning is also crucial to completing an Axure project efficiently. Axure’s flexibility offers many opportunities for inefficiency, but attendees will learn how to plan their projects to avoid them.
Learning Objectives
This workshop is designed for user experience practitioners who have little to no experience prototyping in Axure. At the end of this workshop, attendees will have the skills required to wireframe, prototype, and document a simple HTML Web site.
Justification for a Pre-Conference Seminar
This workshop is based upon the principle of learning by doing, and exercises take time. Additionally, there is a great deal of material to cover, which also takes time.
The workshop will be conducted by alternating between lecture and exercise. The instructor will lecture for a short amount of time and then present students with an exercise in which they apply the skills the instructor was just lecturing about. This pattern will continue throughout the workshop.
The exercises are structured around the task of wireframing, prototyping, and documenting a basic HTML Web site.
Exercises
- Create a Visio-style wireframe of a content-rich Web page
- Create simple wireframes of additional pages and make them interactive
- Generate a prototype
- Generate a functional specification
Core IA-Related Issues
This workshop addresses the core IA issues of wireframing, prototyping, and prototype testing.
Audiences
The audience for this workshop is basic to intermediate user experience practitioners who have little to no experience prototyping with Axure or any other method.
Attendees must bring their laptops to the workshop.
Previous Presentations
This workshop grew out of the more limited half-day workshop given at the 2007 IA Summit. It has also evolved since that time to keep pace with updates to the Axure software.
This workshop, in its current form, has only been offered to the public once. It was offered in October of 2008 in Minneapolis.
This workshop is also offered to private companies on an as-requested basis.
Speaker Details
Fred Beecher is currently a Senior User Experience Consultant and Business Analyst at Evantage Consulting. He has worked in the User Experience industry since 1998 and has been using Axure since 2005. In 2007, Fred developed two Axure training courses, Basic & Advanced Prototyping in Axure RP, making Evantage Consulting the official training partner of Axure Inc.
Lori Baker, Senior User Experience Consultant at Evantage Consulting has worked in the User Experience industry since 2002 and is passionate about the benefits of prototyping and testing throughout the design phase. Lori has been using Axure avidly since 2006 to prototype a diverse array of system