7 May 2008 - 19:48Choosing a Prototype & I/A Tool for EVOKNOW


We have been looking for a good prototyping tool for a long time. As a PHP and MySQL shop, we initially started out by looking for an Open Source product but found nothing worthy of adoption by our power geeks: the information architects.

In the absense of a single, integrated prototyping tool, we had to rely on some of the old fashion concepts to deal with prototypes: use visio to painfully draw a screen and have our UI team translate it into XHTML/CSS/JS prototype. The process was laden with time-traps as customers with half-baked concepts ate away a lot of our UI resources in revisions. We needed something that did not involve our development hands; something that kept the spec-cycle among the key players: customers and our I/A guys. Our primary requirements for a I/A tool were as follows:

  • Must cost less than $1K/seat
  • Must be easy to use so that our info architects are not tempted to do it the old-fashion way
  • Must be easy to embed detailed UI specifications
  • Must be able to generate UI specifications that we can modify in open office tools
  • Must run on XP, Vista (sorry we love Linux for servers but not for power desktops yet)
  • Must have a flow-chart like information flow design capabilities

After checking out a few tools over the last year, we found Axure RP to be the right tool for us. Currently, we have one of our I/A guys trying out the 30-day trial edition and based on his recent feedback and actual work-product, it looks like Axure RP is a keeper! Axure RP enables us to do the following quickly and easily:

  • Create highly interactive, visual prototypes of Web application
  • Demo the interactive prototypes to customers
  • Save our customers time as they can “understand” core I/A easily using a “visual” prototype
  • Embed a lot of UI details within the prototype, which makes life easy for our UI and PHP/MySQL  implementation teams

Key features of Axure RP that we liked are below:

  • Dynamic Panels - you can use them to hide and show multiple panels to create highly interactive screens to demonstrate complex functionalities. For example, you can have both the search query and the  search results in the same screen and show the search results after the user has actually hit the SEARCH button in the prototype — making it easier to “get” it.

Things that we did not like about Axure RP are:

  • Generated Spec File Format - the specifications document generates as  a newer version of MS Word file that Open Office cannot open! We had to figure out how to convert such files using some Microsoft office compatibility package that translates the newer file format to  older office  format. Perhaps, we should blame Microsoft! But it would be nice to have a native Open Office output option
  • Font Issue - there seem to be an issue with font size; we will contact tech support about this soon

On a lighter note, we found the product name — Axure RP — a bit difficult to throw out in meetings. We have already started calling Axure RP just “ARP” to avoid losing all the time gained by using ARP in talking about its name. :)

Finally, we are convinced that ARP will save us a lot of time up front in the specification, prototype phases of our projects, which will surely save our customers time and perhaps even grant our development teams  a bit more sleep as they will deal with fewer revisions. So if you are in the market for a prototype tool, we highly recommend that you give Axure RP a try.  Get Axure RP at: http://www.axure.com.

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