Posts Tagged "Axure training"

I’ve had a lot of feedback the past couple of years of training. Mostly it’s that people want a more advanced class. And they want it from a teacher who really understands where students are starting and how to get them, step by step, to really learn the skills. Oh that’s me!

I proudly announce that Ptype now has an Advanced Axure Prototyping Workshop. As of writing this, it’s not yet available as a video course. That will hopefully be available by the end of 2017. For starters, you can attend our 2-day live, remote workshop. It’s webinar-style and taught by me. Join from anywhere. More info here.

As the curriculum says, topics will include:

• Listeners (automatically running processes)
• Math functions including formatting and rounding numbers
• Form validation and error messages
• Really getting into variables
• Repeaters. I don’t believe repeaters are a “beginner” topic so they are not part of our Core Skills workshop.

To make sure people get personal attention, each workshop is limited to 15 people. Want a spot, sign up now! Registration is open and the early bird pricing is in effect through 2 October 2017. Our reg system will also automatically calculate group discounts for teams of 2 or more registering together as well as a “bundle” discount if you register for all three workshops together.

See you there!

There’s a new video series in town and it’s the only one in English from an Axure-recommended trainer.

Our Axure 8 video series is now live and available for purchase! It’s been a secret, but last year, we connected with O’Reilly to write and create a video series to each Axure 8. It’s finally out today!

It’s only $149.99 USD and is available as a streaming video or DVD. It’s 16 chapters, 79 lessons, and over 9 hours of content. Pause as you need to and work along with me!

Visit https://pty.pe/ax8-video-course to hit O’Reilly’s page on this product and make your purchase.

Works for Axure 7 too!

Axure 8 has some new features that aren’t in 7. The UI of the program is also a bit different. But if you are on Axure 7, you’ll be able to use the techniques in nearly all of my lessons. A few lessons won’t be relevant to Axure 7, but nearly all will.

Enjoy and spread the word!

Hello, Canadians! We are one of the few Axure-recommended trainers on the planet. We have already been training some Canadians, but we figured we’d shout it out publicly since we are getting more and more interest from your country.

We can train Canadians in a variety of ways… pick the one that works best for you or your team.

• Live and on site. We will fly to you and run our usual curriculum or a custom training plan at your location. We charge a day rate plus reimbursement for travel expenses.
• Live and online, remotely. We use Join.Me or can use your remote conference setup for training individuals and teams. We charge by the hour only for hours needed. No travel expenses! No VAT since this is a service taking place in the USA.
• Live at one of our classes. We hold multi-day prototyping workshop intensives in San Francisco a few times a year. You can register and fly in for our Axure training. No VAT since this is a service taking place in the USA.

Please contact us and tell us about your specific training needs so we can put together a proposal. Proposals are free and there is no obligation.

I’ve spent a lot of time reviewing online event reg systems. I do it roughly every 12-18 months. And after nearly 10 years of holding events, the winner remains RegOnline.com. No, they’re not paying me to say this. But hear me out.

If you have a simple event, then EventBrite and ones like it are just fine. You don’t need RegOnline. But evidently, when you need RegOnline, there is nothing else like it.

Do my class registrations look like the most sleek, modern, fancy things? No. But they are simple, laid out decently, and mobile friendly. I’ll take that. 🙂

Why Is An Axure Class Such A Complex Event?

My Axure classes live in San Francisco are not complex on the surface. A core skills class for the first two days. An optional third day on mobile app prototyping.

What’s complex is what I have cooking behind the scenes and how little of it I’d like you to see… so you have a better user experience. This means I need an Event System that knows when to show ’em and when to hide ’em.

• Each “Event” has two classes. You can sign up for one or both.
• Whether you sign up for one or both, the system should treat you as ONE attendee. I found other systems where once you said one ticket to this and one ticket to that, they assumed you were two people.
• There is an early bird discount. Each class has a different price and a different early bird discount. I need to put in when the early bird starts and ends, which is then shown automatically. Other event systems show you an early bird ticket like it’s separate from ticket at another time. I don’t want a long list of tickets by what date you are registering.The system should only sell you the ticket you can get on the day you are registering.
• There group discounts. The pricing is different for individuals (party of 1), send the team (parties of 2-4), and send the department (parties of 5 or more). If you are registering a group of 3, should you see the other two prices or ticket types? No, I’d like those hidden from you so that your path is uncluttered.
• I want there to be discount codes BY class. Most of the systems I reviewed would give people a discount at the end on their whole order. I can do that too, but I like being able to granularly control what discount codes are available (if any) based on a number of criteria you the user will never really see. Plus I don’t discount Axure software licenses, so I wouldn’t want discounts on the whole order.
• We sell discounted Axure licenses to people attending the class (I give them most of my reseller discount and basically break even). The system should understand that selling a class space is different than selling a thing, and RegOnline gets that.
• Most of my class attendees are groups that work at the same company… but they can’t always use one credit card for all of them. For internal accounting reasons, sometimes they have to split the check. RegOnline will let a group register and then have one person pay for everybody OR say how much they want to put on which card. Satisfies everybody.
• I’d like to auto-email people of different types at different times. I want to email people X days before my class with a reminder of the location, time, and other facts. I’d like to email them the day after the class with a follow up survey.
• RegOnline’s back end reporting looks a bit outdated in places but is very flexible.

The Beauty of RegOnline Is That The Complexity Is Behind The Scenes

Most of the event systems I looked at suffered from one or both of the following two things:

• Painful for me to set up. Bad UX on the admin side. Awful layouts. Confusing sections. So many screens just to build one ticket.
• Cluttered for you to use as a class registrant. Most of these systems would list out both classes, early bird and regular reg, and then each of the three group types. That means some reg systems would show you 6 ticket types and some would show even more. That’s no fun to use.

When you hit my class registration pages, one of the first things RegOnline finds out is how big your group is. That way, you are only shown the options and pricing for a group that size (on the next page). That good UX you didn’t even know you were getting. 🙂 Here is how it looks to me in setup (click to enlarge):

What you’re seeing is that there are agenda items, in this case the two-day class as one unit and the mobile app class as another.

• They then have sub-entries representing price discounts that are automatically given to groups of a certain size.
• The field type of “always selected” means you don’t have to ask for this discount. It is there automatically. The Registrant Types area is where I say that only groups of a certain size can SEE this, which is how I give a cleaner UX to groups of other sizes.
• The pricing on the right lets me say what discount they get.
• What you don’t see is that underneath that is additional conditional logic. I could say, for example, that everybody who answered the question “How familiar are you with Axure” as “totally new” will get another $20 off. I don’t do that, but I could. 🙂 Or that everybody who answered a reg details question a certain way sees something in the agenda others don’t.

Room To Grow

RegOnline can do a bucket of things I’m not even asking it to do.

It can understand travel and hotel registration as part of signing up for my classes, but I’m not reselling hotel rooms so I don’t use that.

It has some mobile features, which I don’t really use.

When you create agenda items (that people can sign up for or interact with), you have a LOT of choices.

It actually does a lot more, so if you have a fairly complex event, it may be a good choice for you.

On top of all that, RegOnline is affordable

Choosing to not pass event system fees to my customer (nobody should do that!), I can tell you that RegOnline is fairly priced. As they are charging cards for me, I lose that percent. I could put in gateways but I don’t bother. I’m going to lose that percent no matter what.

They then charge $3.95 per registration no matter how much the customer spends. No minimum per event or year. I can’t really complain about $4 per person! It’s a fair price for what I’m able to do and how easily I can do it.

So after another round of looking at various event systems, including ones that claim to be very complex and fit right into WordPress, I will stick with RegOnline.

We train people on Axure. We are one of the few trainers recommended by Axure on the planet! And proud of it.

There are other trainers, recommended or not. Sometimes we take a look at their lesson plans… and we’re always surprised by them.

It looks like trainers believe they must teach you every key thing Axure can do in one day. Given how much Axure can do, this is likely to cover too much too narrowly in too short a time.

Typically these curricula claim that in one day, you’re going to learn the environment, masters, dynamic panels, forms, variables, conditions, Axure “logic,” widget libraries, adaptive views, and Repeaters. Can that really be done? If you’re coming from a development background, you might be able to learn nearly all of Axure in one day.

Most of the people I’ve trained the past few years aren’t developers.

Why not? Because developers figure out Axure well on their own and generally need little training. The people who come to me for training were sometimes confused by Axure the moment they opened it. They don’t have a programming background. They often have art backgrounds and haven’t had to think of things in terms of logic or processes where the order of things matters.

I’m not saying that all art school people have a hard time with Axure. Some fall into it easily! Many don’t, and that’s OK; it’s why we’re here.

We teach you how to think like a programmer and stay a designer.

We’ve broken core Axure training into eight lessons that take 1.5 – 2 hours each. We start with understanding the software environment (menus, panes, toolbars). We fully cover masters and Widget and Page Styles, which are life savers. We then go into forms using standard Axure widgets and forms when you’ve custom designed the elements.

Not only is that a great lesson for people who like higher fidelity prototypes but it’s also a core skill that you’re going to use in many of our following lessons. Once you can build a custom droplist from scratch, you’re on your way to nav menus, mega menus, accordions, and other standard elements that use similar approaches.

We teach progressive disclosure, setting text, beginner-level variables, and iFrames. We hit adaptive views at the end but don’t go too deeply into prototyping for mobile. That and other lessons like having Axure do math and building “listeners” (automatically running processes) we consider to be add-ons for students after they’re comfy with the foundation lessons.

Nothing gets the quickie version when we teach it. Students are taught how to think out, step by step, each interaction they want to build. Rather than show you, “Here’s how to prototype a website,” we teach skills and approaches so that you can learn to make Axure do whatever you want.

We don’t teach you Repeaters unless you have a note from your doctor.

Repeaters are neato and powerful. They allow you to build “real” data into Axure (think mini Excel spreadsheet with text and/or images) that you can then manipulate. Pretty neat, right?

And also often unnecessary. We used it for an eCommerce prototype because the client insisted that when someone clicked “Add To Cart,” the EXACT item they chose showed up “for real” in the shopping cart. Would the prototype have been “worse” or harder to test if Lorem Ipsum showed up in the shopping cart?

Someone emailed us recently thinking he needed to learn Repeaters because he was going to have rows of data added, edited, and removed from an interface. Well, you could learn Repeaters but they’re rather complicated. Can this just be faked out? Can you have adding a row show a hidden row? Deleting that row removes it and moves the ones underneath up? And you only build certain rows to delete so that the prototype always looking like it’s perfect?

It will be faster and less hassle to build the “fake version.” It might even be fine for user testing. Consider saving your time and “faking” it instead of building Repeaters. Repeaters aren’t the wrong choice. They’re just a tough thing to learn for most people.

I tell students it will take you a half day to wrap your head around Repeaters and then most of the week to start to feel like you get them. I once taught them to a really sharp UX guy, who seemed to pick it up well. At the end of the week, I asked how it went. He said it took him a half day to wrap his head around it and most of the week to just get it to start to work they way he wanted.

Which means I have NO idea how people are teaching it fully as a small section of a full day workshop.

When choosing an Axure trainer, consider the background and comfort of students.

Are your students all developers? Then nearly any trainer will do. 🙂

Are your students artists, visual designers, UX practitioners, managers, business analysts, or product managers? You probably will want to look at Axure training that doesn’t try to pack it all in a day. You may think you are saving time and money on a one-day bootcamp or workshop. Ultimately, the real measurement of that is how much your students learn and how independent they feel after that class.

Our workshops are two full days. We also offer private training on your site or over the internet. Private training is customized to who your team is, what they need to know, and the pace at which they go.

Surprise! We scheduled an east coast Axure bootcamp this year!

It will be a day and a half in downtown Philly. July 20 (all day) and 21 (half day), 2015.

Capacity is 19, so register ASAP to secure your spot. We find most jobs are willing to pay/reimburse for Axure training, so start hounding your boss.

There’s an early bird discount as well as discounts for teams of 2 or more registering together.

For all the details, please see our bootcamp page!

We’ll be on the east coast for private corporate Axure training. If you want some of that awesomeness, contact us for a custom proposal.

Another testimonial has just rolled in for our Axure training, and we couldn’t be prouder.

We now have a heart-warming pile of happy testimonials from UXers around North America who have taken our public San Francisco workshops, private one-on-one remote training, private in-person corporate team training, and pre-recorded video courses.

Kind words have come in from agencies, Fortune 100 companies, smaller (but still important) companies, and up-and-coming UX practitioners including designers transitioning to UX careers.

Read The Love!