Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 2, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Quark Inc. today published the results of a benchmark study showing that the redesigned workflow in QuarkXPress 8 produces enormous gains in productivity, efficiency and return on investment. Conducted by independent consulting firm Pfeiffer Consulting, the benchmark study compares user-interface efficiency and workflow productivity in QuarkXPress 8 with earlier software versions including QuarkXPress 6.5 and QuarkXPress 7.31. The Pfeiffer Report concludes that users can work more than three times faster with QuarkXPress 8 than with earlier versions.
Announced in May 2008, QuarkXPress 8 is a powerful design application developed for creating high-quality layouts, with a new intuitive user interface and many new features for the design process. QuarkXPress 8 allows users to work faster and more efficiently because all tools are easily accessible and more can be achieved with fewer clicks.
Andreas Pfeiffer, author of the Pfeiffer Report, emphasized: “The new QuarkXPress interface design builds on existing tools and extends their functions in an intuitive way, making everyday tasks immediately much more efficient. The new picture-content tool is a wonderful example: intelligent interaction design allows an imported image to be cropped, rotated, scaled and repositioned without switching tools or using the menu bar.”
Pfeiffer Consulting compiled 25 productivity benchmarks for the study, covering various functions and the improved QuarkXPress 8 interface. They included comparative measurements of tool efficiency, image import and editing, file handling, workflow editing and many other areas.
The principal findings were:
• The productivity benchmarks show significant improvements in productivity and efficiency for many frequently used page-layout functions, file imports and editing options.
• The new content tool enables both frames and their content to be edited considerably faster, eliminating time-consuming switching between tools or menu items.
• Direct import of native Adobe Illustrator files improves productivity when editing and creating vector graphics in QuarkXPress 8.
• Seamless creation of interactive Flash-format content, with remarkably simple handling and no programming knowledge required inside a page-layout application, is a decisive advantage of QuarkXPress 8.
• Individual productivity benefits can add up to a return on investment of several thousand US dollars per workstation compared with earlier QuarkXPress versions.
