Doing things efficiently at Digital United - Axure Pro for IA

Here at DU we like to do things efficiently. That doesn't mean slavish adherence to a buzzy word for its own sake, it's because efficiency is the lifeblood of what we do (of equal importance to the monster cash) and a key pillar of our business

Being a highly agile (in both commercial and project management framework terms) organisation, efficiency within our network-based business model, in our work with and for clients is key to who we are, what we do and how we do it. 

I was therefore delighted when Viviana, our IA par excellence, introduced us to Axure Pro.

It's a very useful piece of kit indeed for streamlining the vital step of IA prior to going into creative conceptual development for any website, particularly those where there is a need, as there always should be, to have a clear, logical, informative and, where possible, entertaining User eXperience whilst, at the same time, dealing with sheer 'volume of information' constraints, such as a large, hierarchical and inter-related, fully searchable product catalogue, presented in multiple languages, as was our challenge when beginning one particular project earlier this month.

With any tool, it's only as good as the person using it, but Axure is one piece of software worth getting to know inside out.

As an example of our particular scenario, we input a pretty full requirements specification and knew what the IA challenge was quite clearly. The resulting sitemap, wireframes and interactive prototype (worth a considerable weight in gold for illustrating proposed functionality to a client) generated over the next few days were remarkable for the fact that not one piece of extraneous documentation was generated. We didn't have documentation for the sake of documentation. 

If you pride yourself in every hour of production being an efficient, effective hour of production, then Axure Pro should be a key stage in the process.