Hi folks. I’ve been using the beta for a couple days and have recorded some preliminary feedback. I’ll probably post more in the upcoming days.
THE GOOD:
-Finally some styling for DPs!! Bless you!
-the new player is slick. Mad props for using CSS and SVGs where appropriate instead of rendering everything as PNGs. Scaling to fit the screen is also REALLY nice.
-Hooray for text field styling and focus effects!
I can’t say how much I appreciate these things and I wanted to say thank you before I start on the not-so-good. Please remember that no matter how I rage in the coming paragraphs, I do it from a place of love.
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THE NOT-SO-GOOD:
-General visual feedback: I really liked Axure before it tried to look like Sketch.
-In the new console, I have to click “begin trace” before the trace begins, so there’s no way to see what’s happening on pageload. So when something breaks there, I’m SOL.
-is there no way to have multiple “IF” statements anymore? Can there only be one? I have two statements: one that should ALWAYS execute and one that should execute ONLY IF item.isfirst == true. But this apparently breaks the entire page — even DPs that are 100% wide don’t size themselves onload.
-The new design of the interaction panel is pure FOLLY! My cognitive load is going through the roof trying to understand the layout. Was it designed intentionally to try to keep people from using a lot of conditional logic? I’m worried for people learning this for the first time. SO MANY horizontal lines. I miss the old modal way; I could see a lot more stuff at once. And then once I had edited the interactions, the panel was nice and readable. Now, I can’t tell which actions are in which cases. Speaking of which…
-the case editor is super confusing now. There’s no contrast between the window and the text fields (this is a general problem with Axure now – it’s SO WHITE and the containers are SO UNBOUNDED. It took me forever to figure out “value” is now a subsection of “text”. I will remember this, but it was not intuitive for me. Text strings are text. Values are different.
-oh, another thing about the interaction panel. Copying and pasting interactions is broken. It used to be that I could quickly copy an interaction from one widget and paste into another. Now, I can still copy & paste ACTIONS, but to paste INTERactions I have to use the “add interaction” dropdown before pasting. Minor but annoying.
-The new way of editing DPs is awful. I miss opening them as if they were pages. When the rest of the page is still there, even when it’s masked, it’s impossible to tell at a glance whether something is at (0,0) within the panel or some other location. Infinite canvas is a double-edged sword.
-the infinite canvas aspect of the new design is causing Axure to run extremely slowly on my older (2013) macbook.
-There does not seem to be a discoverable flow for loading a widget library from Axshare.
-Have I mentioned that having the entire UI be white, with only occasional thin gray lines to separate sections, is making it really difficult to navigate? Or how making all text fields lines instead of boxes is making things unscannable? It’s like accessibility wasn’t even a consideration.
-KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS: why can’t I incrementally scale text with cmd + shift + > anymore? That was one of my most-used ones D: