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Prototyping

The lost art of prototyping: why Axure is still the best pick for many designers

Before being a Product Designer I was a Marketer interested in behavioral economics. It was almost 10 years ago and I had the pleasure of working with UX dinosaurs that were designing most of the well-known websites in the early 2000s and 2010s in Poland. Probably this is why I am thinking about UX differently than we think now.

Matt Jedraszczyk

Published in

UX Collective

7 min readSep 4, 2022

In the old days, there were only UX Designers or Graphic Designers. UX Designers knew how to conduct workshops, design wireframes, and prototype them. UI Designers on the other hand designed polished UI’s based on Low-Fi mockups. This is something that I think was lost during the last few years.

The lost art of prototyping

Our roles have become more sophisticated almost as much as our titles, we call ourselves Product Designers, CX Specialists, UI Designers, UX/UI Designers, Cognitive experts, etc. During this time our tools also improved. Instead of using Axure and Photoshop we started using one tool that should help us rule them all — Figma, but it…

After a lot of research myself for the prototyping tools, my answer is also Axure. It's still not easy to be able to save a thousand meetings for me that I do many complicated form interactions. Significant learning requires, but it's worth it.

For me, in a perfect world, we would have one tool with all of the upsides of both Axure and Figma. Axure is fantastic for prototypes, but I feel that for an UX tool, it has pretty bad UX. Figma on the other hand is very easy to use (well, at least…

Great post. To me though it does not even have to be axure - low fi can start in balsamiq and other tools. I like your point of testing interactions early though - Axure really allows to do a lot there. I have not used in a long time (30 bucks a…