The following question appears today on the UX Professionals Group on LinkedIn:
What is your favourite Cloud Based Web / UI Prototyping tool?
Anyone have any answers they’d be willing to contribute to the thread on LinkedIn?
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ProtoShare is excited to sponsor WebVisions Portland from May 22-24 at the Oregon Convention Center. We look forward to seeing members of the UX community from all over the country in our home town.
Andrew Mottaz, the founder and creator of ProtoShare will be hosting a FREE, mid-day mini-workshop on Lean UX. The workshop will be held on Wednesday, May 22nd from 12:30-2:00pm.
In the workshop you will learn about treating design ideas as hypotheses, and how to replace giant spec docs with a shared understanding.
Space is limited for the workshop, so Register Now using your Facebook or email account to ensure you will have a spot! If you are interested in attending the full WebVisions Portland conference, you can purchase tickets here.
You can also come by to check out our booth: ProtoShare will have an area for attendees to test out our software and get to know some of our team. Stop by to meet us and find out why prototyping will improve your process by saving you time and money.
See you next week at WebVisions!
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One type of customer we often see is the software start-up in fundraising mode. The founder is usually working on an angel round of funding, and wants to create an interactive prototype of the software product that they can show to potential angel investors. ProtoShare works really well for this.
I can tell you from personal experience as an angel investor that it can be difficult for an investor to grasp a business idea in the abstract. Unless I can see what the founder has in mind for a software product, it can be all too easy to dismiss the idea because of a lack of understanding. If I can see and interact with a prototype of the software, it’s usually much easier to grasp the idea and get behind it.
Until the founder successfully raises their angel funding round, they usually won’t have the ability to build the actual software product itself – that’s why they are out raising money. But ProtoShare costs only $29 a month. In a few weeks (and sometimes over a weekend), the founder can create a functioning prototype and be out on the fundraising trail. It’s a very small investment that can significantly improve the odds of a successful fund-raise.
If the fundraising effort is a success, this will be the best money the founder ever spent. And if the start-up doesn’t get funded, at $29 a month, the founder has spent under $100, rather than tens of thousands on actual software development.
I guess the surprising thing is that we don’t see more customers like this.
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ProtoShare just launched our new website redesign. We started the redesign using our own wireframing tool and managed the lifecycle of the project through ProtoShare’s built-in collaboration.
As a project manager in the digital marketing world, I have led numerous website redesign projects and know how important visual specifications are to improving the overall process of a redesign.
At past companies I used PowerPoint to create website wireframes and although it works for very basic wireframes, the visual and interactive interest was practically non-existent. When I used PowerPoint for wireframing navigation and layout, there was always a lack of visual specification that had to be made up for in written specifications. In order to protect ourselves from scope creep, we had to include a laundry list of items that were not included in the project.
With ProtoShare, everything is readily visible and you can wireframe from low to high fidelity quickly. I put together a low fidelity wireframe and created multiple design layouts for each page that I then shared with my designer. The designer added fidelity to the layouts, proposed alternatives, and suggested changes. By working together and iterating quickly, we made rapid progress in the design phase.
ProtoShare lets you work your way up to a high-fidelity prototype that looks and acts like a functional website. It also keeps all of your team’s work (final designs for each page, comments on designs, annotations and more) all in one place – making collaboration and requirements tracking a streamlined process.
As a relatively new member of the ProtoShare team, I was sold on the technology before we even started the project. I cannot begin to express how invaluable a tool like ProtoShare is to the design process and wireframing of a website. Simply put, the tool made our redesign process faster, easier, and more enjoyable.
To make things even better, when the project was turned over to our developers, there was no confusion about what to build and everything they needed was right there. I can honestly say, from first hand experience – ProtoShare creates happy clients and happy teams.
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Thank You iRise!
ProtoShare Sweeps the Floor with Axure in iRise Analysis
If you put “ProtoShare” into Google, a paid ad from iRise comes up, offering a comparison of iRise to ProtoShare and other prototyping tools. Being a curious sort, I recently requested the report.
Not surprisingly, in iRise’s report, iRise does rather well, with green dots beside every attribute the report deems important. iRise is an expensive, enterprise-class application (and it was their report), so that didn’t come as much of a surprise.
What did come as a pleasant surprise was how well ProtoShare stacked up against iRise in iRise’s report, and, even more importantly, how we blew the doors off Axure. Here is the report, courtesy of iRise.
Out of the 26 attributes iRise considered important, the report says that ProtoShare has 13 (6 fully and 7 partially), while Axure has only 8 (and all of those only partially).
We might quibble about some aspects of iRise’s report, and I note that iRise did not even include the latest version of ProtoShare in its analysis. Nevertheless, iRise’s report certainly serves as an unbiased summary of how ProtoShare stacks up against Axure, and for that, we say “Thank You iRise.”
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