Karen Bachman has a post out on our sister blog entitled, “UI Design Communication: General Approach and Tips for Axure” It’s for anyone who has a dread of creating and/or reading design specs for front end systems (e.g . web sites or portals). I love the idea of using a visualization tool to capture all the key actions for design. My experience is you can’t capture everything especially in process driven UI’s but you can capture a lot more and it gives a consultant or design professional a couple advantages over the old way of doing things.
- Your business users and approvers will stay interested and will give input in the design process
- It will cut down on “bugs” that are actually changes that pop up in your testing cycles
- Everyone has a larger wellness factor with the project so things don’t get derailed as easily. We are all on the same page.
Here’s a quote from Karen’s well written post
You capture annotations in two places in Axure: attached to each page and attached to individual widgets. You can customize both.
When you know that you are preparing a walkthrough or screens with call-outs, you likely want to focus on customizing the page notes and you should design your prototype to present states as discrete pages rather than to use many dynamic layers.
Customization of page notes is simply a matter of creating additional page note. Click on the Manage Notes… link. In the Page Notes dialog box displays, click the + icon to create a new page note type.
I find myself using Balsamiq a lot these days. For the price, I would say it is the better option for many people. $79 vs $500+ You might not get all the bells and whistles but a savings of over $450 leaves a lot of room to add them.