SOTW - Axure

Every week our team at work looks at a site as part of our weekly meeting. Imaginatively, we call this Site of the Week (SOTW). We look at a variety of things from the good, the bad and the ugly. I thought I’d record them here…

This week it was a product called Axure. This is a slight cheat as it is a product not a site, but it helps build sites and so we looked at a prototype that I’d made using Axure.
Axure is a wireframe and prototyping tool. I’ve been playing with it for the last week and it’s pretty good. Once you get the hang of how it works it is quite fast to use. I would advise that you watch the Masters tutorial from the excellent set of samples and demos on their site.

I’m keen to how this stage of development helps us. Will it be useful in creating better sites, or will it be seen as time consuming? The software looks to be very good at process-driven application sites. But I think it could help with basic flat sites too. For example; the first thing we’re trying it for will be to show senior managers how a site design that is more user-focused and less departmentally organised will work. We need their buy-in before committing to a re-build as it is a large job and we can’t afford to get it wrong.

In due course I’ll try to post up some of the prototypes. Watch this space…