Archive for the ‘Axure’ Category

The Key to the Hover Craft: An Axure Expedition

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

Hover interactions are everywhere. Netflix shows you movie details when you point at the DVD image. Google’s image search results shows you a magnified thumbnail, filename, and dimensions. Yahoo! News displays the first sentence of a news article when you point at a headline.

Hover overlays can add a lot of value when used judiciously, but they have their pitfalls. One factor that can make or break a hover is timing. If you’ve ever tried to read a page containing contextual advertising pop-ups, you’ve probably been irritated by how hard it is to avoid them—they’re on a hair trigger. A short delay between the time the user points at the trigger object and the appearance of the extra information helps avoid accidental triggering and ensuing rage.

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Axure Training: Coming to a City Near Us!

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Since we started planning a public Axure training , I have been thinking about what I was going to say in this blog post and when I would get to tell you all. Is it strange to get this excited about training Axure? Not really, at least for Evantage folks.

Ever since Fred Beecher started to extol the virtues of Axure in 2005 (well, mostly since we started listening to what he was saying, some time in 2007), we have loved how easy it is to create interactive prototypes using this tool. Axure helps us easily communicate a design to clients, it makes usability testing more realistic, and it allows us to include our requirements in the prototype for business analysts and developers. Then Fred went and developed a half-day workshop for the 2007 IA Summit. It sold out, and the folks at Axure asked him to start traveling the country, training companies to use this awesome tool. That’s worked out so well that Fred brought me—and now we’re bringing Jeff Harrison—into the training fold.

Alongside the regular project work we do, we love sharing what we learn. Often, our students have some great idea that earns them a high five during class and an update to our training materials.

So, if you want to learn more about Axure, join Jeff and me on Wednesday, November 3, for the Basic Axure Training and Thursday, November 4, for the Advanced Prototyping class at Aloft in Minneapolis, MN. Each class is $600, but taking both will give you a 20% discount off the total cost. Bring an Axure project you’re working on, or a project you think would convert well to Axure. We’ll see what you’ve done so far and help you make your document more efficient, or talk you through the best way to convert it. High fives all around!

For more information, CONTACT US

If you would like to join us for this event, REGISTER HERE

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Mobile Prototyping Tools (Part 1 of 2) – Axure

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

In the recent past, I have been tasked with designing mobile applications for iPhone. Axure is the prototyping tool we use at Evantage and it has served me well in terms of creating prototypes for mobile applications and demonstrating them on a laptop. However, I have had trouble viewing the prototypes on an iPhone. The screen size shrinks on the iPhone making it difficult to read the content on the screen. In the near future we expect to use these prototypes to gather feedback from users and design applications for other devices (Android, Blackberry, iPad, etc). To ensure that we have the tools at Evantage to meet the demand, I spent some time looking at the workarounds with Axure and pros and cons of other mobile prototyping tools designed for the UX community.
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Posted in Axure, Interaction Design, Tools and Techniques | 3 Comments »

Prototyping iPad Optimized Websites Using Axure

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

I have been tasked with creating an Axure prototype that will be demonstrated on an iPad.  I’ve seen the iPad, played with the iPad, but this is first time I will be creating a prototype to be displayed on the iPad.

The first question I had was, “How will I get the Axure prototype onto the iPad? Is there an app for that? “

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Posted in Axure, Product Reviews, Recent Posts, User Experience | 4 Comments »

Fred is speaking at SXSW 2010!

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Are you going to SXSW? If you are then check out “The Right Way to Wireframe!” This is a two-part talk in which myself and three other user experience designers tackled the same business problem using different tools.

In the UX world, we don’t get to see each other’s work very much; this talk changes that. It shows how, no matter what tool you use, the important part is the thought process you go through to arrive at your solution. Here are the links to the two workshops:

The Right Way to Wireframe – Part 1

The Right Way to Wireframe – Part 2

Also, I’m running a little social & technological experiment… I’m sharing all the notes I take at SXSW with the whole world via Evernote. Of course I’ll take notes at panels, but the really interesting part of SXSW is the discussions on the side. Those’ll show up in my notes too. Here’s the URL if you want to follow along!

http://www.evernote.com/pub/fred_beecher/sxsw2010notes

The environment at SXSW is… well, I’ll be kind and say, “fluid.” If you want to see what I may or may not be attending, check out my schedule on Sitby.Us.

http://www.sitby.us/schedule/fred_beecher/

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