I had a QA guy once ask me how to get rid of a You have unsaved changes
dialog. My answer was “Click Save
.”
It’s about more than a list of features, it’s about building an environment rather than painting a sequence of screens that represent a desired flow of interaction.
I have our entire enterprise admin platform in one Axure file. Every piece of navigation, multi-select tables that present accurate “‘n’ selected” values, repeater tables w/ pagination and functioning column sorts/search filters - I’ve built Content Moderation features, Localization frameworks, Bulk Actions… all inside that “environment.” Each time, stake holders and engineers were able to USE the feature, (down to error handling) in the clearest form of communication between engineer and designer that’s possible. Heck, I’ve got functioning drag and drop re-ordering tables.
Using masters and styles, I have a Style Guide
page that contains every element in the platform. Changing something there and updating its style changes everything on the other side of every link ever sent out because the environment is a living system. If, tomorrow, we change text fields to a new style or our User Avatar Control mechanism changes, I do that in one place for ALL of my pages and documentation links.
You also don’t need to put user testing or demos on rails. If you build to that level of detail, you can sit a user down and say “Accomplish Task A” - “What can I click on?” “Whatever you want.”
What about snapshot workflows? You can document flows via Snapshots that change when the source page changes so you don’t have to keep updating documentation when you change a step in a flow - Just connect a bunch of snaphots together in a row.
What about chip entry/assignment fields that can re-size their chips based on whatever the user writes/selects and can be deleted with logic to pull items below up by the size of the chip container when its empty? Dude I could talk about this stuff all day.
Axure is so hardcore that I won’t take a job that won’t let me use it.