Axure 10 UI update suggestions and bugs

#1

Hey all! Hoping this is the right place for this. Apologies if not- couldn’t find an alternative spot.

At any rate, we recently switched from Axure 9 to Axure 10. There have been a few ease of use issues we’ve encountered between the two. Some of it might just be because we just switched, but I feel like there are a few things that are inherently harder. So, as a user, here’s an outline of some of the issues we’ve encountered:

  1. Dynamic panel state selection difficulty Pretty major usability thing here since I use dynamic panels all the time. When a dynamic panel is selected the navigation for it is sometimes hidden, sometimes shown. It appears to be on mouseover or select, but the problem with that is it means they are inaccessible when you are not precisely moused over the panel or the panel isn’t clicked on. I feel like if you’re selected a dynamic panel it should automatically persist, but this is not the case. I would MUCH prefer the navigation to simply persist when I have a dynamic panel selected. Otherwise it’s a struggle to reach it to navigate between states. I also find the navigation a bit hard to notice.

  2. Hidden objects not always re-hiding when selection is lost Let’s say you have an object that serves as a button and another object that is a popup triggered by that button. The popup is Hidden. The button and the popup are both part of a group. If I select the group then the image in the popup sometimes shows (rather than the yellow transparent ‘hidden’ look), obscuring the content of the page. The only way I can hide it again is to go in to the group, select it, and unselect it again. Haven’t been able to figure out what triggers this to occur yet since it’s not consistent, but it happens pretty frequently.

  3. Entering text on an object This is personal taste, but I miss being able to click on an object and enter text simply by typing as opposed to selecting an object, pressing enter, and then starting to type. It was faster the other way. But I can see if people make more use of hot keys how this could be more convenient for them. Wonder how many people prefer each approach.

  4. Groups steal focus from things around them Let’s say have a couple of groups- say a row of buttons, each with a popup that is hidden unless the button is clicked on. Each button-popup is a group. If I select a group and then try to click in to select its popup the cursor will usually switch to select one of the other groups next to it, even though I’m already focused/selected on the group I want. This might have to do with which group is on top? Not sure.

#2

For #3 I think you can disable hotkeys and it behaves like you expect when typing, that’s how I have mine set up.

#3

That’s good to know! I’ll give it a try. I do use some hotkeys- mostly sub-menu items like copy/pasting styles, so I’ll probably try them both out for a bit for a while.

#4

I’d like to echo what @RobinUX wrote above; I’m transitioning from Axure RP 8 to 10 and the issues she details are the very same ones causing me immense frustration and time lag. I’m close to tearing my eyebrows out, and am tempted to just stay with Axure RP 8 even after they end support.

P.S. I would add that the scripting UI is a bit of a headache for me, as well, but I am getting the hang of it the more I practice.

#5

After using Axure RP 10 for almost a year now, my gripes are still the same with respect to dynamic panel selection and the scripting UI, especially since my prototypes tend to have a lot of dynamic panels that are nested, hidden, or even positioned outside the viewport until summoned through scripting. The amount of time I spend simply trying to select the specific dynamic panel I want (and the “Select Widget” option from the contextual menu is an awful work-around), and then having to click “View All States” after the second click just to get to the “isolated view” of any given panel is god-awful. And often times I have to use the escape key to “back out” of whatever dynamic panel I inadvertently clicked into just to re-orient which panel I’m in — or even worse, I end up needing to just press the escape key repeatedly until I’m back at the top level, just so that I can start over.

I really would like your team to consider and implement a user preference that allows us to decide how we interact with and navigate through dynamic panels. The way it was done with Axure RP 8 was perfect (and I started with Axure RP 6 in 2013, so I’m not just a newbie), made sense and was much less of a cognitive load on my brain. I understand that some people might like your new contextual, in-line viewing of dynamic panels, but please bring the old version back and let US choose which way we’d like to work.

Thank you!
Grant_