Visual Design in Axure RP

Had a productive week last week as I hooked up an Axure prototype based on my visual design direction. After I checked out Adobe's release of Muse today, one feature that caught my eye was the paragraph styles. I did not know that Axure also had this (albeit hidden) feature until I came across Fred Beecher's useful presentation on Managing Visual Design in Axure.

Managing Visual Design in Axure

View more presentations from Fred Beecher

Playing with Adobe Edge

Started to play with Adobe Edge today. Watched this overview and found it pretty easy to follow along while I created my own version. While I've not created a lot of motion design in my career, I am familiar with Flash, and found Edge to be far more nimble. The HTML file in Edge exported a combination of CSS, jQuery and JavaScript.

While Edge doesn't yet fully support HTML5 (objects exported as divs instead of canvas), Adobe says they are moving in that direction. Too early to judge?

The Who, What and How

A quick, sketchy diagram of UX tools and artifacts in the context of design process.

Brooks's Law and Babies

During one of our training workshops on UX Estimation, I was introduced to Brooks's Law. As a best practice, one needs to strike the right balance of scope and people on a project. This needs to be done before the project starts; not during. As Brooks stated, "Nine women can't make a baby in one month." When you consider factors such as ramp-up time and communication overhead involved for each person added, it becomes clear why you need to get the estimation right the first time.

On Thinking on Your Feet

As a consultant, it's important to be able to think on your feet. It's a skill that's not practiced often enough, and one that can strike fear into our hearts. In a group exercise led by our director, today our UX team was challenged to think on our feet when he asked each of us  a specific, UX-related question. It really drove home the importance of having natural, rehearsed answers to questions about what we do. 

• Make the personal connection when explaining. When asked, "What do you do?" we could respond with, "I improve design so that you don't swear at your computer screen." Effective because people immediately connect with that. 
• Sample questions: What is UX? What does <your company> do? Why should we do Personas? What do you do at <your company>?
• How do we respond to objections? E.g., "We don't have time for wireframes. Can't you just jump into the visual design?" Or, "You're able to code the designs as well, right? We don't have the budget for an additional resource."
• Pitfalls: We descend into jargon. E.g., "I'm a Visual Designer, not an Information Architect." Difficult to say "no" to clients.
• Better ways to approach. E.g., "Here's why you don't want me to ____ . I'm maxed out at 40 hours a week. It's possible that our timeline will be blown."
• Objections are opportunities to educate client on process and roles so that we can be preventative. E.g., "We have three roles. Here's why." Shows that it saves time to involve more people than less. 
• Put yourself in the client's shoes. Their interest is how they are going to get their product out.