We write a lot about how to build prototypes and wireframes. Sometimes we forget to emphasize the importance of Review in ProtoShare. After all, the only reason to build a prototype is to communicate your ideas. ProtoShare’s Review functions let all of your stakeholders experience and leave feedback so that you can quickly iterate through ideas.
I was inspired to write this post by an article on ConceptShare’s blog about speeding up your creative review cycle. I wanted to call out a few ideas that you can implement using ProtoShare to improve your processes. As this post started to get rather long, so I’m going to write multiple posts, and focus on a single issue per post.
1) Provide Context to the Reviewer
With ProtoShare, there are many ways to provide context. First, a functioning, clickable prototype invites exploration which helps stakeholders to get a better understanding of what you’re building.
Second, you can add ‘Annotations’ to your wireframe, which can provide specific instructions and tips on any given prototype. You can also set up your annotations so that they ‘trigger’ a state. When your user clicks the annotation, you can activate an animation, pop up a dialog or whatever you need to get the prototype into the right state.
Add annotations to provide context to your reviewers.
While both of these can help users engage with the prototype and leave valuable feedback, another method that can really help guide stakeholders is by seeding a prototype with Topics. In this example, we’ve used the ‘purple’ colored pins to walk stakeholders through important points. They can respond to the seeded topics, or add their own topics in response.
Users can restrict their view to just the ‘walkthrough’ topics, and clicking each topic will navigate them to the correct part of the prototype, and also activate any necessary states so that the Reviewers see exactly what you want them to see.
Use topics to guide reviewers.
In the next few days I’ll be adding articles discussing a few more items on the list of tips to improve your Review process. If you’ve got your own tips, share them here!