Axure – Using Notes to support your prototyping workflow

Document your intentions and ideas

The notes section in Axure is another underrated feature of Axure. Especially when designing a prototype as a team. In this scenario, I think the following rule of thumb should apply.

Write at least two notes for every page, describing:

• Page intention / Desired User Behavior
• Reasons Why / Triggers
• Obstacles
• Improvements (to keep track of good ideas)

Additionally, you can add the following notes, they really make sense, I see them as CAN-fields or Nice-to-have fields. Those would be:

• Targeted Version
• Mobile Behaviour (what changes on smaller screens)

The comment feature should be used with fellow colleagues, who have access to your team project and therefore have gone through some kind of expertise check – otherwise they hopefully wouldn’t have access to your project. If you want to catch feedback from a broader audience of spectators or a not so expert crowd, you should use the discussion-feature that comes with the HTML-Export.

But the best tool doesn’t do you any good if you are not used to using it. So practice or even force yourself to fill in at least two notes. Your future self will thank you and you will always keep track of the essential information that is behind each screen design.

Tipp: If you are uncomfortable with others being able to read your notes –  you can exclude the notes from getting exported into HTML by simply creating or customizing the HTML-Export in Axure.

Also you can add notes to each element. I don’t recommend you do this, because it is very tedious work and I don’t think it offers that much of a benefit. But in case you are wondering, here is a idea on how to use notes on an element level. You can use notes organized into named sets to document your notes right.

• Set: Planning
  • Improvements
  • Alternatives
• Set: Workflow
  • Note
  • Last edit
• Set: CMS
  • CMS Location
  • CMS Key