Some time ago I created a prototype for a website that consisted of a multi-stage contest. The contest would run in 3 stages:

1. Promotion/Entry (people upload content for judging)
2. Voting/Judging
3. Post-contest (display winners, etc)

The content for each of these stages would also be customized for signed-in and signed-out users.

It’s easy to do this kind of thing in Axure (of course it is) but I find that presenting such a prototype is always a challenge because there’s no trigger to display the different content over time.

Previously, I’d create prototype pages that acted as starting points for reviewing the prototype from a specific use case perspective, and these starter pages would set the appropriate variable values for the example workflow. This works fine when you’re in linear presentation mode, but causes problems when clients ask questions that would require you to start the experience over with different starting values: “Can I see this page in stage 2 of the contest?”.

In addition, at my workplace, we are using the HTML prototype as a guideline for developers, designers, and QA to do their magic. It’s a hassle for them to work through the linear steps to set variables when all they want is to get a sense of the changes on each individual page based on the contest stage (or whatever criteria accounts for the content change).

So anyhoo… I built a little widget that toggles any given page based on variables that specify the user logged in state and the contest stage.

After doing this, I find that I’ve been using it in a lot of projects because it’s so convenient to be able to tour all of the customized content variations on each page.

View the sample prototype.

Download the Axure RP (version 5.5) file