[Sigia-l] Sigia-l Digest, Vol 115, Issue 1

[Kevin W Bishop]

Hi Tom,


*I have a few comments to share with you which I've injected into your
message below.*
*For clarity they shall all be in bold. *

-------------------
On Mon, Sep 14, 2015 at 9:36 AM, <sigia-l-request at asis.org> wrote:

Searchable list archive:   http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/

Today's Topics:

   1. Axure and Development Specification (Tom Donehower)

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2015 10:50:23 -0700
From: Tom Donehower <tdonehower at gmail.com>
To: ia-55 <ia-55 at meetup.com>, sigia l <Sigia-l at asis.org>
Subject: [Sigia-l] Axure and Development Specification
Message-ID:
        <CAHR8aLCD5A7eveOLMHNa4qSEoZ-fdXv_r_dFx4YQPN++mDf8zw at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

[snip]

I'll share with you my own experience. Initially I have tried to use the
specification output from Axure, but just found it too inflexible and too
unwieldy. I ended up importing the spec in Google Docs and then a colleague
and I manually annotated the document, which was easier than specifying in
Axure, but still isn't the method I would recommend.

*The MSWord document that Axure creates uses a template that, I agree, is
somewhat inflexible but there is room for improvement. You can, for
example, save instances of the specification generation tailored to a
specific prototype so that titles, summaries, authorship, and other fields
in the document can be created every time you generate the spec. *

I have heard of others who specify a use case for every interaction and
then publish the use case to the clickable prototype. I have not tried this
but am curious what others think.

*Not quite sure I understand but this sounds laborious. *

I have also heard of others who create sticky notes as dynamic panels that
can be turned off and on as needed in the clickable prototype to describe
behaviors.




*Those "sticky notes" are automatically created in the generated prototype
unless otherwise deselected in the Generator's settings for that particular
prototype. Always customize your Generator for each and every project!*

*For example, some readers of the spec may not need to read the interaction
notes (the faux .js); others may want to read only interaction notes and
not UI annotations. I learned this only recently, that you can configure
the notes for different audiences. Very cool! (Learned from a video I
reviewed on udemy.com <http://udemy.com> by Packt Publishing entitled
"Learning Axure RP" by Stuart Cooper. I highly recommend it b/c it taught a
veteran user of Axure RP 7.0 like me quite a few new tricks I never had the
need to discover before.) *

*The Generator settings also allows you to determine some of the formatting
in the Word document. *

What are your thoughts? In this day and age when building digital products,
is a massive spec document still needed? Is just a clickable prototype
enough with some annotation?



*And on the heels of my previous comment, customize the Notes panel for
every project! You can name each and every column header in the tables it
generates, determine whether the value for the column is selected from a
drop-list (helpful when wanting to normalize naming conventions for UI
elements and enforcing other controlled vocabularies and/or UX patterns),
or by default be a "number" or "date" instead of plain text. *
*In sum, most of the projects I've worked on using Axure required only
Specs or Prototypes. As a result, I've had to learn how to maximize the
benefits of each type of generator output separately but once you learn
them both, prototyping for multiple audience types and for both outputs
will become powerfully effective.  *

Of course nothing replaces face to face communication and that will always
be part of the development process, but what I'm trying to get a better
sense of is the level of specification needed for distributed teams and the
best form of that specification and how it's maintained specifically when
using Axure.



*I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that a whole new generation of
prototyping tools have been released in the last years or so and merit your
own, personal investigation. *


*Happy Prototyping! *
*-kevin w bishop*