See Us at WebVisions Portland, May 16-18

WebVisions PortlandNot only is WebVisions an awesome event that explores the future of web and mobile design, technology, user experience and business strategy, but the event is also celebrating its 12th year in our backyard!

This year’s event hosts an all-star lineup of visionary speakers, including Nathan Shedroff (author of Make it So and Design is the Problem), cyborg anthropologist Amber Case, Thomas Wester of Second Story Interactive Studios, Jeff White of Industrial Light & Magic, Thor Muller (author of Get Lucky), and more!

ProtoShare WebVisions Discount:  Select the Association Member rate with the code “PROTO” when you register.

WEBVISIONS PORTLAND
May 16-18, 2012
Oregon Convention Center

The event kicks off with Studio Tours, film screenings, a Hackathon for Social Good, the Business Innovation and Education Lab and networking parties galore. And of course, a full day of individually priced workshops followed by two days of sessions, keynotes and panels.

Founder and CTO Andrew Mottaz will be hosting a roundtable discussion on Lean UX in the Main Hall on Thursday, May 17th at 12:30pm. Come learn about Lean UX or share your own experiences to benefit your peers.


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Add Live Views to Your Wireframes & Prototypes

ProtoShare has many great features. One that people are often happily surprised by is the Live View feature.

There are many reasons why you may want to use Live Views. Here are a few that we love:

  • Current website / web app updates
    Need to make some minor adjustments to a published site? Just pull in a “live view” of the site and overlay the changes you want. Solicit feedback from stakeholders to validate the edits and use the prototype to communicate those edits with developers.
  • Inspiration for a project
    If you’re team is in the research stage of a new website or mobile app project, you may want to share examples of other site functionality, an app’s intuitive interface, or creative inspiration. Add live views of these examples as separate designs of a page and share with your stakeholders.
  • Tracking works in progress
    Use ProtoShare Live Views to bridge the gap between developers and clients or other stakeholders. You can track progress or compare the development site to the wireframes by pulling in the live view of the dev site.

See our video below (no sound, just step-by-step instructions) on how to use Live Views in ProtoShare for your wireframing projects.

If you have other tips for using Live Views, share them with the community in the comments.

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Lean UX Tools

Lean UXI attended UXImmersion here in Portland last Tuesday and I was struck by Jeff Gothelf’s presentation about Lean UX. This was recorded for UXImmersion OnDemand, so I recommend watching it.

We’ve been reading and thinking about where UX fits into Agile development, and Lean UX in particular. I was struck by two things that Jeff said. First, Lean UX is about rapid iteration, user testing and hypothesis validation (which it has in common with Agile). A second tenant of Lean UX is shared understanding, particularly between UXers and developers. But I think that really applies to everyone involved—from high-level stakeholders all the way down the line.

ProtoShare is a great way to do both of these things. Starting low-fi, moving to high-fi, working through many iterations, sharing early and often, and using real HTML, CSS and JavaScript that your users can experience. But where ProtoShare really shines is with shared understanding, which I think is the harder of these two principles to accomplish in practice.

What I love about ProtoShare is that it provides a continuous stream of communication between high-level stakeholders, user experience professionals, designers, developers and end users. And it does this whether you’re in the same room or on different continents. Our most successful customers call ProtoShare the “brain” or the “bible” of their projects because it provides this shared understanding across normally uncoordinated groups.

Jeff showed a huge workspace covered floor-to-ceiling with whiteboards for communication. This got me thinking of ProtoShare as that whiteboard—flexible, centralized location, a sort of project clearing house—that you can use for dispersed teams. If you get your team in ProtoShare, you can get your work done, and ProtoShare handles the documentation. You don’t just get a sketch or a prototype, you get the discussions, thinking and decisions behind it.

At any rate, I’m excited about Lean UX. User Experience matters. It’s about time our development processes start to embody that.

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We Want Your Love (and Your Feedback)

As a company, we really have two goals: We want every one of our customers to love ProtoShare, and we want every one of our customers to love the experience of working with us.  Seriously. We’re always trying to get closer to the “love” on both of these goals.

In terms of the product, it’s almost as if ProtoShare is our child. When people compliment it, we beam; when they criticize it, we’re hurt (and, probably, sometimes a little defensive). But we always listen. We use the feedback we get from customers to build new features, and when we get word of bugs, we fix them as quickly as possible. We think the result is that ProtoShare is the most powerful tool in the market for true “Collaborative Prototyping”.

One thing that frustrates me is that it isn’t always easy for new customers to learn quickly all the powerful things ProtoShare can do. We often get calls from new customers (and sometimes even more experienced customers) who think they can’t do something with ProtoShare that they need to do when, in fact, they can. We need to improve how we communicate the product’s powerful features.

We continually try to improve the training videos. We also offer customized training and a weekly live webinar. And our customer support staff is always there to help. But we do need to do a better job of making it as obvious as possible in the application itself how to do things that our customers need to do.

The other thing we need to work on is explaining to our customers how collaborative prototyping with ProtoShare can fit within their workflows. I’m sure it’s frustrating to a new customer to see the promise of the product, but have the challenge of figuring out how to make it work within their organization. We’re working on this issue as well.

In terms of meeting our second goal, getting our customers to love the experience of working with our company, we’re always trying to improve. Our customer service group is very important in this process and receives great reviews from customers. We also provide personal account management and on-boarding training for larger accounts. We try to make billing and payment as easy and convenient as possible. The goal is LOVE (which might be tough to get to for any company), but we really want to get as close as we can.

Ultimately, only you can decide if you love ProtoShare and if you love working with our company. I’d really like to know what you think–positive and negative. The positives will help guide us to do more of the things you like (and make us feel good). The negatives will help us improve.

Please email me directly with your comments. My email is bwiggins at site9.com. I’ll respond to every message. Taking the time to write will help us improve the product and your experiences working with our company.

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Mobile Prototyping and View on Device with ProtoShare 6.2

We are happy to announce the 6.2 release of ProtoShare. With it we have introduced the foundation needed to create mobile wireframes and prototypes for our Business Edition Customers. We’ve also included several updates for all our ProtoShare products. See the Release Notes for details.

Mobile app development is no longer a luxury for companies. Whether it’s having a mobile website congruent with responsive design best practices or building an application to complement service offerings, mobile development has become standard practice in today’s business landscape.

We’ve taken a hard look at what’s required for mobile application development (and even tossed up some beta iPhone features for a while). What we discovered is that it’s not enough to just build a mobile wireframe or prototype and interact with it on a desktop screen. To truly experience how a mobile website or mobile app is intended to act, we must test/experiment/interact with it on the target device. Only from there can we uncover the business or UX requirements.

The latest version of ProtoShare includes screen guides to help users build their mobile apps to the right size, mobile stencils to quickly add standard widgets to wireframes, and a View on Device feature to send a prototype to a target device to experience. Changes to the wireframes then appear instantly with a refresh of the mobile screen and stakeholders can continue to comment in ProtoShare’s Review interface to keep the process moving forward. Check out our new tutorials on mobile prototyping.

mobile prototypes - view on device

In addition to the mobile offerings, all ProtoShare users can add animated transitions to their prototypes. According to Rachel Hinman of Nokia Research Center, “animation and transitions can help users form a mental model of how information will ‘unfold.’” They can make an interface feel more natural, intuitive, so have fun playing around with them. For more information on animations, visit our Tutorials page.

We’re excited about this release of ProtoShare and even more excited about what’s to come. (We’re working on building a ProtoShare Community.) Stay tuned over the next several weeks to learn more.

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