Book Review: Prototyping Essentials with Axure

The Book’s Chapters

Prototyping Essentials with Axure includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 1: Prototyping Fundamentals
• Chapter 2: Axure Basics—the User Interface
• Chapter 3: Prototype Construction Basics
• Chapter 4: Creating Basic Interactions
• Chapter 5: Advanced Interactions
• Chapter 6: Widget Libraries
• Chapter 7: Managing Prototype Change
• Chapter 8: UI Specifications
• Chapter 9: Collaboration
• Appendix A: Practitioners’ Corner

The authors kick off Chapter 1 with a general discussion of UX design and prototyping that is both contemporary and unique. This is a good read and, in itself, adds lots of value for the UX community. However, it is not a direct update of Chapter 1 in Schwartz’s first book, Axure RP 6 Prototyping Essentials. I’m a big fan of that work, and my advice to anyone entering the field of user experience—as well as to many more experienced UX professionals—is that you would do well to read Chapter 1 in both books!

Chapter 2 begins the practical work of learning Axure by orienting the reader within the overall structure of the Axure workspace. Because the book covers the breadth and depth of the Axure environment, this gives the learner a good framework for understanding the software. This is exactly how the practical work in Ax-Stream’s Axure training courses begins, and I believe that this approach provides an optimal introduction to using the software. To me, this seems the obvious way to start, but the authors of many other instructional books have chosen to completely ignore some aspects of an application’s user interface at the beginning, so maybe it’s not so obvious!

The remaining chapters take the reader through all key aspects of using Axure, with each chapter building well on the learner’s previous knowledge as the learning experience progresses. A single case study runs throughout the book—another thing I’m a big fan of in instructional books. It’s a technique that I’ve used in my own books and papers, and one that we also use for all of Ax-Stream’s Axure training courses. Again, this seems like such an obvious approach to me. It helps to keep the learner oriented and build on previous learning. Books that use lots of different case studies often become disjointed and difficult to follow, in my experience. Given my viewpoint on this, I have a minor criticism of Schwartz and Srail on this point: they do occasionally use examples that are not part of the primary case study, when it seems that case study would have been capable of supporting these examples, too. However, all of their examples work well, so this does not detract from the overall cohesion of the learning experience.

The book concludes with the “Practitioners’ Corner”—an excellent resource that strongly reflects Schwartz and Srail’s practice-based orientation. This Appendix provides additional resources for the Axure practitioner—such as advice on debugging interactions—and contains detailed advice from seven battle-hardened Axure gurus on how to optimally address common issues in Axure.

Content

Throughout the book’s chapters, there are numerous instances of “Warnings or important notes” and “Tips and tricks.” These vary in usefulness from nice-to-know information to killer advice from Axure gurus, and on the whole, they add a lot of value—not least because, in keeping with a key ethos of the book, these have originated from hard-learned lessons on real Axure projects, and they can save you hours of time.

The book also explores some of the concepts and reasoning behind its instructions and why the authors have done things the way they have. No book can compete with a face-to-face training course run by an experienced teacher who is a subject-matter expert on Axure, because no book can flexibly address the needs of individual learners and test that they’ve actually achieved deep learning. However, Schwartz and Srail’s book stacks up pretty well in this regard. This is something that sets a good instructional book apart from an average one.

Since the time of the book’s publication, Axure version 7 has evolved to include several minor enhancements. Therefore, some of the illustrations in the book are slightly out of date—and, of course, the book does not cover these enhancements. Because Axure constantly adds new features, these sorts of inconsistencies are inevitable and are likely to increase. However, the additions are pretty obvious and do not cause any problems for the learner. The instructions in the book remain 100% valid.

Conclusion

My final compliment for this book comes in the form of a criticism! The book is called Prototyping Essentials with Axure. My issue is with the word Essentials. Reading this book definitely won’t make you an Axure guru. You can achieve that level of expertise only through extensive and wide-ranging practical experience using Axure and pushing it to its breaking point on a regular basis. But this book can certainly take you well past the Essentials! Indeed, I’m sure that it will take many UX professionals a long way down the road to mastering Axure, and many of them will keep this book in their rucksack throughout that journey. So I certainly recommend this book to any UX professional who favors learning how to use applications from instructional books.

The people who take Ax-Stream’s Axure training courses appreciate our focus on teaching the core concepts of practical prototyping with Axure. At the end of our courses, many of them ask whether we have a reference manual to which they can refer as Axure’s features evolve. We used to tell them that there was no need for such a manual because we already had Axure RP 6 Prototyping Essentials. Of course, we’ll now be recommending Prototyping Essentials with Axure as the primary support book for our core Axure courses. Why will we be doing this? Because this book lives up to my belief in the unique value of learning from people who have walked the walk. Quite simply, it’s the best all-round book on Axure to date.