Product Management,  Programming

Product Management :: Using Azure for Mobile Prototyping

I’m not going to lie to you, I’m a really crappy developer. And I have traditionally used OmniGraffle for prototyping web and mobile apps. But I recently found a cool little tool called Axure. The process of learning Azure was going pretty well. But there were a few things I couldn’t nail down exactly; so I got this handy little book called “Mobile Prototyping with Axure 7“.

Designing for mobile apps is different than web apps or even something like FileMaker, which is why prototyping instead of just building flat diagrams with a tool like OmniGraffle is so important. This book took me through Axure with an example-led, hands-on approach that basically did a lot of the work for me, allowing me to really quickly provide a team of developers with a vision of what something should look like and how it should behave. Especially since I’ve written a Packt book and am pretty familiar with the style and layout, it was a quick and easy read. And I realized I could do a few things with Axure I hadn’t even planned on doing when I bought the tool. Overall, great stuff and if you do a lot of prototyping, UX, product management or true design work, I couldn’t recommend it more.

The official description of the book:

Mobile app and website design are two of of the most popular areas of user experience design. Axure RP 7 allows you to design and build mobile prototypes and deploy them to real devices for testing and stakeholder review. It also allows you to create an interactive HTML website wireframe or UI mockup without coding. Axure 7 has new features such as new widget events, page events, adaptive views, and so on, that give you more flexibility while building mobile prototypes.

If you have experience with Axure but have never designed anything for mobile devices or responsive design, this book will get you started right away. This book contains working examples of how to complete some common mobile design tasks using Axure and focuses on creating rich, functional prototypes for mobiles, whether they are apps or websites.

Using this practical, example-oriented guide, you will learn how Axure RP 7 can be used by user experience designers to create and deploy mobile prototypes on smartphones and tablets.

You will also learn how Axure RP 7 can be used to create adaptive views for multi-device designs, sliding menus, mobile-friendly forms, drag and drop interactions, tool bars, and basic transitional animations common to mobile apps. You will get to know how to publish prototypes so that they can be tested or demonstrated on a real mobile device.

Anyway, love how you can get books on topics like this these days, so thought I’d share!