[IxDA Discuss] What do these prototyping tools give me? (RE: Axure RP Pro prototyping tool)

[David Heller]

If people concede the point about these tools not working well as a
conversion prototype > word platform (which is what I'm hearing), and then
it is just about prototyping, then ... Why these tools?
What do they offer that another development environment doesn't? I mean
iRise and Serena have pretty heft licensing costs. That is pretty hard to
justify when I can great prototypes in Dreamweaver or Flash or Flex 2.0 or
the upcoming tools in the Expression Suite from MS, just as easily.

What am I missing here? Seriously, I'm about to head into a HUGE hosted
enterprise application re-design, and I'd really like to know what I'm
missing out on. I've looked at these tools, but a separate Wiki for
gathering requirements + Dreamweaver seem to be working fine. So I'm really
curious about this. $10k for a $5m project doesn't seem like a lot to ask
for, but it is still $10k .. But compare that to $5k for 5 licenses of
Studio 8 by Adobe, and I just don't see the cost benefit analysis. Help me!

Aspects that people didn't talk about are:
Maintainable objects
Sharing across teams, and within a team
Annotating (was sorta mentioned)
Converting prototypes to something consumable by other teams (Dev & QC jump
to mind).

I think Jay hit one requirement on the head and that is being able to create
data sets to be used for usability testing.

-- dave