An Interview with Victor Hsu

Victor: We participate in the discussions and try to help when customers ask questions. We try to bring some attention to the events, books, sites, and libraries that they share. But we try not to interfere too much. I think the best things that we can do are to continue making Axure better for the community and run a business that we can all be proud of. Beyond that, it’s really the community and its leaders who have created an environment that makes others want to contribute.

Peter: Your licensing model means that, recently, users have received free updates. What led you to that model?

Victor: Versions 6.5 and 7 were both free updates for all customers. Prior to that, there was an optional, yearly renewal fee that users paid to continue getting updates. The main reason for the change was that renewing a license was a terrible experience for customers. We sold a lot of renewals, but I don't think anyone enjoyed going through the process. It felt really good to make that change. It’s possible that a future update will have a charge, but hopefully, not until the process is much, much easier.

Peter: Axure users range from those using just the basic functionality to power users. Before the responsive features in the latest version became available, people were coming up with various hacks to get some measure of responsiveness into their prototypes. How do you balance usability against the needs of power users?

Victor: I like features to be consistent and flexible. Interactions are a good example of this. Once you learn to create a basic link, learning to respond to mouse movements is fairly simple because it’s consistent. This is great both for getting started and when you need to go beyond the basics only once in a while. At the same time, the event-driven model is flexible enough so power users can build things like the pre–version 7 “crazy flicker” hack for responsiveness.

This level of simplicity isn’t always possible, so advanced features are sometimes a little harder to get to, but hopefully they’re worth the extra click. If you take a look at adaptive views in version 7, there’s just a single button in the user interface to start adding views. It’s a huge feature under the covers, but if you don’t need it, it stays out of your way.

Peter: What challenges have you faced during the eleven years you’ve been working on Axure?

Victor: One of the tougher business decisions came after releasing version 1. After spending an unpaid year developing version 1 based on an embedded browser, we sold only a couple of handfuls of licenses. We almost called it quits, but decided to keep going and started over with a custom diagramming environment.

From the development side, the first Mac version was easily one of the toughest releases. We combined a C# application with Mono and a custom UI framework that we developed internally. There weren’t a lot of resources to learn from, and I think we did some things that just hadn’t been done before.

Because it’s fresh in my mind, I think version 7’s adaptive views stand out. We decided to address responsiveness fairly late in the project. We knew that adding the feature would dramatically extend the project timeline and that it would be difficult to get right. So far, it looks like it was the right decision.

Peter: Finally, we’ve seen a lot of changes in the last eleven years, as you’ve developed Axure to better address the challenges of changing Web technologies—most recently responsive design. What does the future hold for Axure? Could we see product teams using Axure to generate production code?

Victor: We’re going to continue building software to support UX professionals and others who are moving the software industry forward. There are both some small steps and some big steps that we think we can take to help move prototyping forward. We’re already seeing some production sites being built with Axure—in addition to axure.com—and this has a lot of room to grow.

Peter: Thank you for your time, Victor,  and for all of the effort that you’ve put into Axure over the past eleven years!

Victor: Thank you!