Justin Bondoc

Intelligent Canvas: Layout tools for Axure RP 11

On-canvas drag handles, tidy-up, and position swap, closing the gap with Figma on RP's most-requested layout fixes.

Product Manager / Product DesignerQ4 2024B2B SaaS / Design & prototypingAxure RP, Figma, Jira

Company context

Axure RP is a prototyping tool for PMs, designers, and BAs. PMs own discovery and design with no separate handoff. Layout is a daily workflow.

Mandate

Make it easy to adjust spacing between evenly spaced widgets without multi-step workarounds. Shipped alongside tidy-up and position swapping, together the top upgrade driver in customer surveys.

  • No performance impact
  • Support horizontal and vertical selections
  • Feel native to the RP canvas

My contributions

Discovery and prioritization

Synthesized support tickets and feature requests. Customers repeatedly asked for distribute-by-margin and spacing without resizing, comparing RP unfavorably to Figma.

Design and prototypes

Built interactive Axure RP prototypes simulating multi-select and handle dragging. Shared with engineering to clarify behavior before implementation.

Requirements and edge cases

Documented when handles appear, how they render in the gap, and vertical vs. horizontal behavior, with mockups as the single source of truth for eng.

Problem

Users were spending too much time on layout and spacing, especially when they had to resize widgets to get the spacing right.

Layout pain was the top driver in upgrade surveys and came up repeatedly in competitive evaluations.

What customers were saying.
What customers were saying.

Research and prototyping

I needed to do competitive research to understand how other tools handle spacing and layout. I also needed to talk to customers to understand their pain points and how they currently work around them.

Key decisions

Competitive research

I needed to understand how other tools handle spacing and layout.

Customer interviews

I needed to understand their pain points and how they currently work around them.

Reverse engineering

I needed to understand what exactly the rules needed to be, and how to communicate them to engineering.

Heavy prototyping

I needed to build a prototype to understand the full interaction and how it would feel to use.

Check out the prototype used in the spec
Conclusions drawn from research.
Conclusions drawn from research.
A mockup of the line of sight rule.
A mockup of the line of sight rule.
02

What we shipped

Draggable handles appear in the gaps between equidistant widgets. Select an evenly spaced row or column, hover, and drag a handle to increase or decrease the shared margin, without resizing any widget.

Adjust gap with on-canvas drag handles

Select a row or column of evenly spaced widgets and drag the handles in the gaps to increase or decrease the shared margin, without touching any widget.

Tidy up selection

Select a messy group of widgets and tidy them up into an evenly distributed grid in one action.

Position swap

Drag one widget onto another to swap their positions on the canvas.

03

Outcomes

Q4 2024

Shipped

1 dev + 1 PM

Team size

#1

Upgrade driver in customer surveys (layout features)

  • Addressed the core workflow without the group-and-resize hack customers had used for years.
  • Made RP easier to defend in competitive evaluations where layout and spacing came up.

Retrospective: Canvas features are hard to spec in words. Interactive prototypes in the same tool customers use paid off: engineering could see selection, hover, and drag in one place. Tying handle visibility to distance-guide rules kept the mental model simple: if you see the guides, you can adjust the gap.