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?

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.

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.”

ProtoShare is proud to be a sponsor of Lean Day: UX at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City on Friday March 1.  This exciting one-day event will focus on case studies and best practices in implementing Lean start-up principles and Lean UX in enterprises. We take pride in supporting our community and learning from the best. We will be raffling off subscriptions for ProtoShare at the event and we hope that you are one of the lucky winners!

Our own Andrew Mottaz will be there, so if you’re planning to attend, look him up and say hi.

I spend a lot of time talking with our customers. In the course of these discussions, I always learn something new about how our customers use ProtoShare in their work. It’s interesting to hear the various ways in which different customers use ProtoShare’s collaboration (the pins and topics available in “Review”). I wanted to take this opportunity to write about how (and why) our customers are using ProtoShare collaboration.

While not an exhaustive list, here are a number of categories on ProtoShare customer collaboration:

1. Brainstorming with Internal Stakeholders
2. Early Collaboration with Internal and External Stakeholders to Determine if the Project is Worth Pursuing
3. Collaboration on a Project within the UX Team
4. Approval and Feedback from Stakeholders
5. User Testing
6. Working with Developers

Brainstorming with Internal Stakeholders

One of our largest customers uses ProtoShare primarily as a brainstorming tool. Their app development group uses ProtoShare to quickly create multiple rough mock-ups of ideas for group meetings. The group can quickly disregard bad ideas, and further iterate on good ones using ProtoShare during the meeting. Once the meeting is over, internal stakeholders can further refine ideas that survived brainstorming using the pins and topics within ProtoShare.

The key to a useful brainstorming session is preparation. If brainstorming is just an excuse for group-think and letting someone else do the work, then it’s a colossal waste of time. But if the meeting organizers start with a firm goal in mind, and take the time to prepare some prototypes to get the conversation started, then brainstorming can be an extremely valuable endeavor. Read Collaborative Prototyping, Groupthink and Design by Committee to learn more.

Early Collaboration with Internal and External Stakeholders to Determine if the Project is Worth Pursuing

Sometimes a prototype is a fully-thought-through, pixel perfect representation of a completed design – but it doesn’t have to be.

Often, a development team is faced with the question: should we build a particular piece of software or functionality that is described in one of our user stories? All too often, the answer is: let’s build it and see what people think. Weeks or months and thousands of dollars later, you discover you built the wrong thing.

A quick prototype can significantly reduce this risk. It doesn’t have to be pixel-perfect; it just has to give the internal or external stakeholder a visual representation of what you have in mind, so they can tell you if you’re headed in a useful direction.

We’ve used this in our own development efforts. There have been times when we thought we understood the customer demand for a new feature of ProtoShare. To test this, we have quickly created a rough prototype of the feature and shared it internally and with members of our product advisory board. Given that our product advisory board members are located all around the world and in many different time zones, ProtoShare review is a perfect way to get useful feedback without having to schedule a meeting that will inevitably be inconvenient for many participants.

Sometimes, when stakeholders can see and interact with the feature in a prototype, they decide it is not as useful or valuable as they thought it would be. A bit of time spent prototyping and collaborating early on saves a lot of time and money working on the wrong things.

Collaboration on a Project within the UX Team

ProtoShare is an ideal way for members of a design team (whether they’re in the same building or on different continents) to work together on a design. Using ProtoShare’s pins and topics, everyone involved in the effort can be sure their comments and ideas are part of the mix. By using the “decisions” and “resolution” features in ProtoShare, the team can reach conclusions and move the project forward. Read more about the creative collaboration process and process improvement with collaboration.

Approval and Feedback from Stakeholders

Once you’ve created a prototype, you need to get feedback and approvals from “higher-ups” (unless you are the boss), either within your organization or from clients. ProtoShare’s topics and pins structure works very well for this work-flow.

In ProtoShare, there are two main roles: editors and reviewers. The people who create the prototypes (and have responsibility for making changes) are editors. Internal or external stakeholders who have decision-making authority, but who don’t do the actual creation, are typically reviewers.

One very nice feature of ProtoShare is that you can control who gets to see each topic and comment. You don’t need to share UX team discussions with senior management or your clients. You can limit their access to comments and questions directed solely to them.

Most of us have experienced working on a project, completing it, and then 6 months later getting questions from an executive or client about why you did something a certain way. The next 2 hours are wasted searching emails and meeting notes trying to find the answer. With ProtoShare, where topics serve as the “brain” of your project, you can easily reference past projects and find the answer to any questions that may come up in the future.

User Testing

Unless your software is perfect from the start, it’s a lot cheaper to get feedback from users on a prototype than it is to make changes to a completed piece of software. ProtoShare is ideal for early user testing of a proposed UI.

For user testing, you simply invite the participant(s) to be a reviewer on your project. Then, you subscribe them to a series of questions in the topic panel that will walk them through what you want them to test in the prototype (don’t worry, reviewers will only see topics they have been subscribed to). The users can then respond with comments to the topics you have created for them, giving you valuable feedback early on in the process, before expending development dollars on the wrong design.

A key to this being useful, however, is the level of detail and functionality the prototype provides.  A wireframe “prototype” that consists of a group of grey boxes (or napkin-like sketches), and limited interactivity, will almost certainly fail to elicit useful information from user testing.  That’s why the high fidelity of ProtoShare is so important in the context of user testing.

Working with Developers

When its time to start coding, we believe that the most useful specification for developers is the ProtoShare prototype itself. ProtoShare’s collaboration makes working with a development team, whether they are across the street or on the other side of the world, as seamless as possible.

By inviting your developers to your project as reviewers, your developers can have access to the functioning prototype, and all the discussion and decisions that took place in the topic panel for that project (at least the topics you want them to have access to). If they have questions, they can add their questions to the project, and you will receive immediate notification (giving you the opportunity to respond quickly). Because each design, topic and other artifact within ProtoShare has its own unique URL, your developers will be able to link their development management tool to the relevant artifact within ProtoShare – making the process even more seamless.

Since ProtoShare is written in HTML, CSS and Javascript, many of our customers use the underlying ProtoShare code as a starting point in their development process. This gives you even more reason to include your developers in the project, at least as reviewers.

Some customers go further in collaboration with their developers. They include the developers as editors in the project. This way, if the developers have suggestions for the approach that might be different from the approach in the prototype, they can prototype their suggested changes and share them with you for comment. Providing developers with editor privileges also enables them to make the build-in-progress available to you in ProtoShare for your review.

Conclusion

I hope this has been useful information on how ProtoShare adds to the development and design collaboration process and has sparked some ideas that you are interested in trying.

Are there collaboration opportunities we missed?  We’re interested in any ideas you have.

Meghan brings a wealth of knowledge from her years in the Internet Marketing industry. Having worked at a small boutique agency, a mid-sized software and service company and a large global corporation, she has a deep understanding of the needs of ProtoShare’s customers and users. With her background in Marketing and Project Management, Meghan knows first hand how beneficial a tool like ProtoShare is for a web development team. Meghan and her husband enjoy time with their fluffy Bernese Mountain Dog/Newfoundland mix, who loves to play with them in the snow during the winter and swim with them during the summer.

Andrea brings over 10 years of consultative software sales experience and record sales achievements to ProtoShare. Andrea is a listener; she has the ability to assess client needs, develop relationships and help clients achieve their goals with ProtoShare. At Andrea’s previous position with Axium, she was the Senior Regional Account Manager for the Northwest, managing a Regional territory of 13 states and BC, Canada where she handled sales of software products and services. Andrea is a new and very enthusiastic motorcyclist, who even enjoys riding in the rain. She loves to spend time with her kids and explore the different landscapes Oregon has to offer.

Welcome to the team Andrea and Meghan!

I’d also like to congratulate Brandon Comerford of Chicago, who was randomly selected to win either a one-year ProtoShare subscription or an iPad Mini for participating in the survey. Congratulations Brandon!

Our customers are the reason we built ProtoShare. Thank you for your continued support.

Every ProtoShare free trial starts with an entitlement of 1 Editor, but you are absolutely welcome to increase the entitlement to as many Editors as you like.

When you log in just go to the “Billing Details” tab. Click on the “Change Plan/Add Editors” button.  Add as many Editor seats to your free trial account as you like. (It is a free trial for heaven’s sake!) Note: you must be the account creator to make this change.

Once you’ve increased your Editor entitlement, you can add as many individuals as Editors as you like to any projects you have started in ProtoShare. Just go to the “Project Members” section of the Dashboard for each project.

The purpose of your ProtoShare free trial account is to give you as much chance as possible to work with ProtoShare. If you’re part of a team, why not have your whole team working with ProtoShare during your free trial?

To learn more about inviting people to projects – as Editors or Reviewers – read last week’s post.

1. Use Stencils and Widgets from the community resource library to get off to a quick start

ProtoShare has a Community Resource Library of Stencils and Widgets that you can drag-and-drop into a ProtoShare Project. The Community Library can be accessed from a button at the bottom of the Component Palette in the Editor or at http://community.protoshare.com/category/stencils/.

2. Re-use your work across Projects

ProtoShare allows you to create Masters and Templates that you can re-use in a Project. These Library items can also be imported from one Project to another. Another workflow many ProtoShare customers use is to create a “Master Project” that contains all of their Masters and Templates. Then, they just copy the Master Project as the starting point for each new Project.

3. Use custom colors and shapes in your prototypes

With the release of ProtoShare 6.3, you can create almost any shape or color in the ProtoShare Editor, without having to use the Advanced HTML Component or CSS in the Stylesheet. This new flexibility is available within the ProtoShare Inspector and in the toolbar.

4. Drag-and-drop images and URLs to your project

With ProtoShare, you can drag-and-drop any image from your computer’s desktop directly into the Editor or the Library > Assets folder. You also can drag-and-drop a URL into the Page Designs section of the Page Tree or directly into an IFrame Component.

5. Prototype for Mobile and Review on the native device

The ProtoShare Business Edition contains Screen Guides for prototyping apps for mobile devices, and allows you to view your prototypes on mobile devices with a URL and PIN supplied in the ProtoShare’s Review mode.

6. Guide Reviewers by the order of your Topics in Review Mode

ProtoShare allows you to guide the activities of your Reviewers by the order of the discussion Topics you create in Review Mode. By creating the Topics in the order that you want your reviewers to experience them, you can guide their review through the prototype.

7. Use Page Designs to create multiple versions of a single Page

ProtoShare allows you to create multiple Designs of each page in your Project. You can use this feature to show the evolution of the page from a simple sketch or wireframe to a high-fidelity prototype, or you can use this feature to create multiple versions of a single Page for user testing.

8. Use States to simulate interactivity

Many beginning ProtoShare customers never learn that you can use States to create interactive elements like pop-ups, light-boxes, tabbed panels, sortable grid-views, swipes, and many other elements of interactivity. This is one of ProtoShare’s most powerful features.

9. Use underlying ProtoShare HTML code as a starting point for development

ProtoShare is written in HTML, CSS and Javascript. The code is very clean. Many of our customers use the code generated by ProtoShare as a starting point for development, saving time and money in the development process.

10. Learn how to quickly use ProtoShare  in the weekly Webinar

Every week we present at least one Webinar, designed to help customers learn the basics of ProtoShare and get off to a good start. Sometimes we host more advanced Webinars for our more experienced customers. At the Webinars, you can ask questions and get help.

If you need help doing anything with ProtoShare, please feel free to contact ProtoShare Customer Service (customerservice@protoshare.com). They’re here to help you.

We Love 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.