IA Summit 2007, March 22-26 at the Flamingo Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Pre-conference workshop

Prototyping RIAs In Axure (Registration closed: Workshop full)

Fred Beecher

23/03/2007 (Friday). Half day (pm)

As rich interactions become more common on the Web, it is becoming more and more important for IAs to get these interactions in front of users before development begins. Traditionally, this has been accomplished through paper prototyping. While this technique is great for simple interactions, it can’t give an accurate picture of how people interact with modern rich Web applications.

As a result, interest in creating interactive prototypes has grown in the IA community. The results of Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s recent series of surveys indicate that interest in specific tools such as Axure and iRise is very high. Both of these tools compress the wireframing and prototyping processes into one step, which makes prototyping more achievable and explains the level of interest.

I have been working with Axure for the last year and a half, and have completed six projects using this tool (and am working on a seventh). Four of those projects involved prototyping rich Web applications. In that time, I have learned how and how not to develop and document prototypes in Axure. Participants in this workshop will benefit from my experiences and will learn how to quickly and easily create highly effective prototypes in Axure.

I learned by trial and error, but participants in this workshop will get to skip the error altogether. This will be an interactive workshop in which techniques are demonstrated and participants complete mini-tasks using those techniques. Toward the end of the workshop, participants will combine all the techniques they’ve learned and create a richly interactive prototype of their own.

Participants will learn:

  • The basics of working with Axure
  • Details about the various dynamic widgets in Axure that allow for rich interaction
  • How to combine dynamic widgets to prototype sophisticated interactions
  • How to work around Axure’s limitations and idiosyncrasies
  • How to structure prototypes to get the best results from user testing
  • How to fake content efficiently
    • Communicating the limitations of the prototype (common comments I’ve heard users make when working with Axure prototypes)
    • Techniques for getting the prototype to communicate the effects of a user action when those effects cannot be prototyped (getting it to communicate its own limitations in context)
  • How to make the wireframe-to-prototype process efficient (Axure offers myriad opportunities for inefficiencies)
  • Putting all this together… How to prototype an RIA in Axure from start to finish

After completing this workshop, participants will be well-equipped to jump into a prototyping project of their own.

Participants will need to bring:

  • A laptop with Windows XP and the free demo of Axure installed. (Intel Macs running Windows through Boot Camp or Parallels work fine. The free demo can be downloaded at http://www.axure.com )
  • AC adaptor and mouse. There will be lots of dragging & dropping.
  • An idea for a site you’d like to try to prototype.

I will have a limited number of CDs of the Axure demo on hand for those who are unable to pre-install the program.

IA Summit 2007