Rapid prototyping with Figma

Axure was my primary prototyping tool for years, but I haven’t used it recently because my designs have completely migrated to Figma. There are some things I miss about Axure – it’s excellent at complex prototyping. Building realistic table functionality in Axure was great – I don’t think any other tool out there can match it for things like that, although Figma has come a long way in the past couple years with more advanced prototyping functionality.

Figma really excels at delivering sophisticated design aesthetics. Designs always looked a little clunky and blocky in Axure, and its team collaboration was also a bit fussy. Figma really hit collaboration and design components out of the park and I wouldn’t trade it for another tool at this point, but about 4-5 years ago when I started using it more regularly I had to scale back my expectations with prototyping. Ultimately it was a gift, because, for user testing and research, it allowed me to move quicker and rapidly prototype ideas that maybe were not as functional as an Axure model, but still conveyed the nuance we needed to talk through with users.

Advocate Central user testing

Advocate Central is a web application used by a large customer service group that helps members with their prescription medications. In summer of 2023, I partnered with our user research team and built two prototypes to test a future state design for our customer service agents.

This is what the tool looked like at the time. It had a ton of accessibility issues including a lot of color contrast violations.

I wanted to test a new design with our updated pattern library, fix accessibility issues, and see if we were missing anything vital the Advocates needed. We were testing primarily for two things:

1. Was our main dashboard robust enough for the Advocates and if not, what information was missing?
2. Would the medication checkout workflows we had on the member facing side work for the Advocates, too? The workflows for members were simplified and my hypothesis was that they wouldn’t contain enough information for our Advocates.