The Convenience of Components

Do you have UX/UI elements that you’ll probably use on most or all pages of your prototype? If so, Components are your friend. Whether you have a quick and simple low-fidelity prototype, or a complex prototype that you’ll be working on for some time, revisiting components can be a great way to enhance your prototyping experience.

Components help you save time by allowing you to save a collection of widgets into a group that you can easily add to any page in your prototype. Similar to custom widget libraries, components also allow you to add interactions to the widgets when building a component, and those interactions will be present in each component instance. 

Tip: What makes components different from widget libraries is that anytime you update the main component, any instances of a component that have already been added to pages in your projects will automatically be updated as well.

So when and why should you create a component? Common design elements that components are great for include headers, footers, and navigation menus, since these elements are often used on multiple or all pages of a prototype. This allows you to build these commonly used design elements once, and then add them to multiple pages in a matter of seconds.

How can you take your components to the next level? Components also have additional neat tricks, such as text and image overrides, which allow you to easily override one specific instance of a component without affecting any other instances. You can also create component views to correspond with any adaptive views that you may have in your prototype. On a more advanced level, consider trying out using raised events with your components, which allow you to configure actions under an interaction event that target widgets outside of the component, and can be set at the page level.

We hope this deeper dive into the benefits of using components will inspire you to make use of this feature in your Axure RP Prototypes. As always, to submit any feedback, you can contact us at support@axure.com. Happy Prototyping!