Interactions. What have you done?

#1

Hi Axure,

Big fan of the latest Beta, with the exception of one area; Interactions.

Below is the same file/interactions in RP8 & RP9. For a product that is focussed around User Experience, I’m really struggling to get my head around why you have made the decisions you have with the redesigned Interactions area. I really don’t think this is a case of ‘no one likes change’, it just doesn’t make any sense looking at the 2 screengrabs side by side. I used to be able to quickly scan the interactions area to work out what is happening, not anymore.

Screen Shot 2018-09-13 at 14.11.48.png740×3040 420 KB

Screen Shot 2018-09-13 at 14.11.53.png1184×1498 134 KB

Rant over, but hopefully you can do something to provide some better UI to more power users of the Interactions area.

Cheers,

Jase

#2

New interaction panel look is nice , but only for simple interactions.In case of more advanced ones there should be something like for example simple version of VisualStudio IDE or Sublime like editor or something with script editor…just more simpler …but you know what I think. Framer CoffeScript in its IDE is what I mean.
Great option would be switch between simple / advanced view just idea :slight_smile:

#3

Your way of adding interactions in RP8 is no longer the most efficient in RP9 – opening the same file using different Axure versions is pointless.

Actually, the screenshots that you’ve shown prove the point opposite to the one you made.

In Axure RP8, each time when you should add a new element to the interaction, you created a new interaction instead. For example: You created 8 different “Hide” interactions (to make RP8’s interface more legible) which could be done with one interaction instead (this way it’s still legible in RP9 and also it’d take less precious space that you ranted about)

#4

@matkrk There is a good reason I do this and it’s all focussed around future proofing any amendments, for example:

Let’s say I created 8 Hide (or show for that matter) interactions under 1 OnPageLoad in RP9, but then wanted to move around the order of the 8 hides (this happens when working on super complex stuff), I can’t. I would need to remove the whole OnPageLoad and start again. The way I use RP8, I could easily and quickly do this.

I’ve been using Axure for 8 years now and the need for this happens a lot.

If you’ve got a solution where I can keep this compact but still move interactions around, I would be forever grateful!

Cheers

Jase

#6

Or better it shouldn’t have been changed. don’t fix what’s not broken

#7

The headline of this thread describes it quite aptly: "What have you done?
The revised version of Interaction Input may be suitable for newcomers who have never worked with interactions before. If you’re not familiar with it, you’ll be guided step-by-step through the creation process.
But for everyone else, the new way of inputting and managing interactions is a real nightmare: the input is slow and absolutely confusing in any view. As you can see in the pictures of the thread creator, the old version had a pretty extensive overview of the whole macro. in the new version you just can see 3-4 steps before you have to scroll.
I just can’t believe you want to advertise the new version of the interaction as optimized UX. That’s just awful.

I know you’ve put a lot of work into creating the reworked interaction input. For my sake, keep the input (which I still don’t think is any better). But PLEASE, it allows power users to continue to use the previous input. Build in the old menu again and make it accessible to power users again.
As it is currently implemented in Beta 9, I’ll probably just go crazy if I want to manage the interactions in our previous projects.

#8

It would be great to get a view from Axure on all of this, there are a number of interaction posts about this now.

#9

Hi All, thank you for all the feedback. The interactions pane was a big change so this is very helpful. We’ll continue iterating on it during the beta and after.

Descriptions of “broken” workflows are great. Like this:

Let’s say I created 8 Hide (or show for that matter) interactions under 1 OnPageLoad in RP9, but then wanted to move around the order of the 8 hides (this happens when working on super complex stuff), I can’t. I would need to remove the whole OnPageLoad and start again. The way I use RP8, I could easily and quickly do this.

As @matkrk described, v9 is more legible when all the widgets are in a single action. BUT you do lose the copy and paste of individual actions and individual actions in 9 do take up more space. We’ll be looking at the space issue and also evaluating features like an ability to copy and paste individual widgets within the actions which could help here.

World's smallest add icon
#10

^^ This. I understand the desire to simplify the interface to protect against defections to new products like Invision, Marvel, Adobe XD, Sketch, etc. I get it, I really do, and I get that designing an interface for both “novices” and “experts” (air quotes are intentional there) is really difficult. I live that every day.

But there are a number of people here for whom “seeing less is not more”. The Ax8 UI was just about right for that. I can quickly jump to specific states of a dynamic panel from something that’s always visible. I can easily make sense of complex panels with nesting and multiple masters. I can open a single dialogue to work on my interactions all at once, in the order I want to. I could make that panel as big as I wanted to on whichever screen I wanted.

I feel like I’m being left behind here.

#11

The idea here seems to be about allowing interactions to be managed inline. They’re already listed in RP8 and you can take limited actions on them, but to fully manage them you have to open them up in a dialog box. In RP9, you can manage them fully within the list without the dialog box. I think this is a welcome iteration in their design. Perhaps there are changes they can make to allow this to be more efficient, like the comment about having a simple vs advanced view.

Perhaps the old way of doing things wasn’t technically broken, but the workflow was definitely cumbersome. This solution allows you to quickly switch between objects and modify their interactions. Also, I like the breathing space afforded here. The actions and attributes are clearly denoted vs having everything displayed in a single, continuous line of text. it was always pretty hard to distinguish multiple attributes within an action.

Although one thing I noticed with the OP’s workflow is that he creates a separate action for each attribute instead of combining them together. For example, there are 2 “Set is selected of…”, 2 “Set”, and multiple “Hide/Show” actions that could’ve been combined. I’m not saying that’s wrong but it might be why the experience is especially jarring.

Btw, here are a couple old ideas riffing on inline interactions. So I’m a fan of moving in that direction. :slight_smile: https://jjkwz0.axshare.com/#p=home

RP8-idea1.png1400×900 49.8 KB

RP8-idea2.png1400×900 67.8 KB

#12

Hi @pixeler, thanks for comments, not sure if you have seen my above comments above around the reason why I have multiple hide/shows:

"There is a good reason I do this and it’s all focussed around future proofing any amendments, for example:

Let’s say I created 8 Hide (or show for that matter) interactions under 1 OnPageLoad in RP9, but then wanted to move around the order of the 8 hides (this happens when working on super complex stuff), I can’t. I would need to remove the whole OnPageLoad and start again. The way I use RP8, I could easily and quickly do this.

I’ve been using Axure for 8 years now and the need for this happens a lot."

If you’ve got a solution where I can keep this compact but still move interactions around, I would be forever grateful!

@victor This might be a temporary solution you could release quickly?

Cheers

Jase

#13

Oh no I didn’t so thanks for pointing that out. I can see how that would help planning ahead.

What would be really neat in this case is if you could drag and drop an attribute into a new action. For example, if you had 5 attributes under a Show action, you could pull one of those and it would create a new Show action with it.

#14

Thanks for pointing that out and in general I agree with the decision to make values directly accessible in the main window.

However what i liked about the old way, is that you can center the editor and apply the changes focused, with a natural head position. It’s physically uncomfortable to stare at the edge of the screen (27" Screen) in search for a tiny interface element to adjust a value.

Maybe just an option to pop out the new editor would solve this issue?

#16

Just wanted to share my opinion on this topic as well. Because I do agree with the opening statement of the interactions-panel taking up too much space compared to the V8 interface.

I just played around with my first project in V9 and several interactions. And of course there is some case of ‘getting used to it’… and even though I find that the interactions-panel looks nice. It’s functionality has decreased significantly for me.

Negative points for me are:

  • There is no good overview anymore
  • With already 2 cases present, the conditions + triggers of case 1 aren’t visible to me
  • The icon/btn of adding a case is not as intuitive as it could be. I find that the icon is very small for the action it represents
  • The option to add logic is also very discrete for the action it represents

There are some positives though:

  • I find it looks nicer, so somewhat of this look but with more overview would be interesting to me
  • The suggested ‘common interactions’ are interesting… haven’t used them yet, but I can imagine them being useful
#17

I agree with what has been said about how it wasn’t broken in the first place. I loved the modal and the clear separation of actions in RP8. When it comes to building really complex interactions, having all the decisions spread out in space is a positive thing. With the new version, everything is all stacked into the same basic location and it takes conscious effort to pay attention to what level of the hierarchy I’m jumping in and out of with all these dropdowns. It has definitely slowed down my problem solving process. Please return to the 3 column modal or a similar experience please.

#19

I agree with the original poster. I spend most of my day working in Axure. Interactions are the entire point to Axure. RP9 interactions aren’t right at all, yet. Interactions are what make Axure the choice to use. The RP 8 interaction builder was non-ideal in that you had to scroll through large lists to do things that would be easier if typed, and there were other areas for improvement, like problems in copying and pasting interactions. Now copy and paste is even worse.

Let’s separate it into two parts: 1. building the interaction and 2. displaying the interaction

  1. Building Interactions
  • Adding typeahead to select an interaction is a good change. Well done!
  • Adding interactions is not a modeless state. You shouldn’t be able to start an interaction and then click & scroll around the prototype as RP 9 lets you do.
  • Building an interaction in the sidebar sucks for utilization of space. Even if you had an interaction builder that starts in the sidebar, but could be popped open into an advanced modal interaction builder (more like RP8 except with your excellent typeahead interaction selector), that would be MUCH better. I would prefer an Axure preference where interaction editing always shows in a modal advanced dialog.

-This is further complicated by including long winded text explaining what you’re doing. See the example below with Raised Events. If you don’t know how Raised Events work, you need that long-winded helper information, but then you never want to see it again. This is further evidence that a) it shouldn’t be in a sidebar and b) that helpful tips about interactions are only a good and fine idea if you can then hide the tips once you know what you’re doing.

  1. Display Interactions
  • the color coding is nice, but other than that, it’s a total fail.
    -The display of interactions in RP9 is bloated and useless for non-trivial interactions.
    When you have a long list of interactions, you want the display to be very compact. That makes it easy to read and follow to check it and add to it later. RP9 bloats the whole thing into an unreadable mess. It’s a pretty mess, but still useless.
    -Along with taking too much space, it skips details needlessly.

In the screenshot above, it shows a small part of multiple IF…ELSE cases that changes a dynamic panel state. What state for each case? You can’t tell without clicking into each one. That makes it incredibly difficult to read and check anything before adding to an existing interaction.

Respectfully,

-Bill

#21

It took me a while to find the enable case (IF) button & the tiny + was elusive as well.

There is too much going on here whilst the core action elements are difficult to find (e.g. the purple accent doesn’t add much value for the visual weight it holds - it’s too prominent).

Likewise, the shadows just add to visual distraction & don’t serve much purpose (& waste vertical space).

Would be great if sections collapsible at each action level - but just give me a simple rule under each (not that big shadow)

The ‘+ Add Target’ action is too light (nowhere near accessible) & you don’t need a ‘+’ and the word ‘Add’

#23

How about we can have a toggle between “Designer mode” & “Expert Mode” ?
Expert mode will be what interactions panel looked like in rp 8, and default view will be designer mode which is what it looks like now?

win win situation, right?

(correct forums as well, i mistakenly replied to someone else, deleted my comment, now replying to yours, says “body too similar to what you have posted”, did the program notice i deleted my comment?)

#24

In case editor, how do I collapse the case? Suppose I have more than 2 cases, it becomes very lengthy to scroll up and down. Before we could collapse each case.
Is it possible in Axure 9?

If not, may we please have that in next update?

#25

I agree that the redesign of the interactions panel is significantly less effective in its current implementation. The lack of compactness is a definite issue. But the thing I’m struggling the most with is the visual weight / hierarchy in the new design. For example:

This is extremely visually confusing to me. Some observations / questions:

  • Looking at the OP’s Axure 8 example, the use of indentation means you can immediately see the very clear hierarchy of actions falling under a case falling under a trigger. In the current implementation, there is no indentation anywhere and instead relies on other visual queues which are inconsistent and competing for emphasis.

  • Why are the actions visually pulled forward with a brighter background and drop shadows? Does this effectively aid in the visual hierarchy? I would argue no.

  • Why is “+ Add Target” always visible but the insert action “+” hidden in a gap between actions.

  • Why does “New Interaction” and “+ Add Target” have text labels but inserting an action is labeled only with a tiny “+”?

  • Why is the “New Interaction” button at the bottom of the interactions panel and set far away from any already defined interactions? After defining just a handful of interactions, the button can be pushed off the screen and doesn’t even seem associated with the existing interactions.

  • Why is color being used to indicate case grouping? To me this is a pretty poor substitute for indentation. If color is going to be used, why is it broken up into a series of dashes rather than running alongside an entire case? Speaking of color, in the example above is the Show/Hide action triggered by the OnMouseEnter event or part of Case 1 of the OnClick event? Hmm…

  • If interactions are going to take up so much vertical space, could we have some expand all / collapse all controls?

  • It would be really nice if items in the Outline panel featured the interaction lightning bolt indicator as another way to quickly get to items that have interactions on them.

Sorry for all the critical feedback, but interactions are the thing that really makes Axure stand out from the competition and while the rest of v9 seems really great so far, this currently feels like a step in wrong direction. I do like the inline editing, I just think the visual hierarchy / clues feel pretty bonkers right now. Cheers!