Here’s a link: Adobe Apollo

Axure v4 was released this week. You can download a 30-day free trial copy at  http://axure.com/downloads.aspx.

There are some great new features:

• Interactions: You can make prototypes respond to MouseOn and MouseOut events
• Dynamic Panels: Widgets for which you can define multiple states, triggered by interactions
• Masters on masters: You can now add a master to a master, which is something you couldn’t do before
• Radio button grouping: You can now make radio buttons single select
• CSV report generator: I haven’t played with this yet, but this might allow for some better integration with, e.g., Rational products for tracing requirements and such
• Ultra-configurable Functional Spec generation: There’s pretty much nothing about your functional spec that you can’t control now… however I’ve played with this a bit and it still seems a little buggy.

And there’s a whole slew of other stuff. Check it out if you’re so inclined.

According to an article in Reuters, a Dutch scientist found that half of all product returns are because customers can’t figure out how to use them. The study also revealed some other interesting information, such as the fact that consumers in the US will struggle for around 20 minutes before giving up on a product. The study also found that most of the problems occured at the beginning of the design process in product definition.

Maybe it’s time to start charging more for our services!

In his most recent post, Scott talks about his experience with a workshop at the eTech conference called “Creating Passionate Users,” given by Kathy Sierra. This workshop, he says, is very hard to summarize. But some of the salient points he picks out have broadened my perspective of user experience.

For example, Sierra talked about the idea that “users want to kick ass” at something. They want to feel like they are continually learning and gaining expertise. This is (part of) what creates passionate users.

This reminds me of the conversation I had with Karl Fast last Saturday at the IA/UX Meetup. He was talking about how his research right now is around how the actual interactions people have with systems can affect their cognition and learning of the knowledge domain. To me, designing a user experience that ellicits passion seems like a *very* effective way of improving the stickiness of learning. When people are excited about things, they think about them and keep them fresh in their memory.

I’m not sure what actual bearing this will have on the kind of work that I typically do, but this will definitely be floating around my mind for quite a while. I imagine that it may inspire an added BANG! factor somewhere down the line for some otherwise uninspiring campaign site… We’ll see!

(I nearly forgot to mention… “Creating Passionate Users” will be a book sometime in 2006… look for it!)

 http://looksgoodworkswell.blogspot.com/2006/02/yahoo-libraries-released-ajax-patterns.html

It’s full of useful links for you coder and pattern-user types.

These libraries have all been released under the Creative Commons license. This seems like an interesting strategy to fight Google… release your stuff for free so people start building stuff like yours, then people will be used to your stuff instead of Google’s. Very technical. : )

Oh, behold the glory that is Gmail.

Anyway…

Reading through a discussion on CHI-WEB or sigia-l (I don’t remember which), I noticed a nifty little text ad on the right talking about a rapid prototyping tool. As rapid prototyping is my current fetish, I clicked on the link. It went to here:

http://www.axure.com

My jaw loosened.

As I read through the site, it dropped altogether.

This tool is custom designed to make wireframes for Web applications (and regular content sites too) that you can turn into a functional prototype in, literally, the click of a button (F5, to be precise). The basic screen where you lay your pages out is a sensible grid that makes aligning a snap. You can easily edit the properties of each object, including specifying the list of selections in a drop-down box. You can also make any item on the page into a link. And this is the best part… each item can actually have MORE THAN ONE link! So when you create your prototype, you can have a button that will display two options. For example, you could go to an error condition or a search results page. This is much easier to show than talk about, so here is the prototype of a physician directory I made in 30 minutes (including time spent learning the application). You will need to allow activex controls to see the fancy stuff I’m talking about.

Directory Prototype

I’m beginning to find the application itself more useful even than Visio. It has things we rely on like master pages, but it also has things we’ve needed badly for ages, like master objects (called “references” in the application). There are some goofy usability issues and bugs in the prototypes (e.g., the last item in a drop-down is selected by default instead of the first), but these can be worked around initially and fixed very soon, I’m sure.

So I might be all about this tool right now, but you should all go check it out for yourselves. You can download a fully functional demo from Axure.com. There’s a 30-day trial period, but really I only needed 30 minutes. : ) I’d love to hear what you all think of it.

Enjoy!

(PS: Some bad news… It is PC only, which is a crying shame. )