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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We’re currently moderating the stencil library ourselves, but we’re working a facility for our customers to create widgets, either to donate back to ProtoShare’s library, or to create private libraries for their own internal use.

Right now, we need your help. We’d like to know what kind of stencils and widgets you’d like to see. Either leave us a comment below, or send us an email at customerservice [at] protoshare.com to let us know if you find these useful, or have any questions or comments. If you’ve built something special in your ProtoShare instance that you’d like to make available, get in touch with us to discuss adding it to the library.

UPDATE:  We’ve just added the Android Icon Set to the library.

The option to export your project is found under the Pages tab and in the Editor File menu. You are able to export all pages on the project or just the pages that are selected in the Page Tree.

In the Export menu are various options that can be selected to customize your export, such as publishing an HTML export to the web and adding screenshots of all page designs to the Word document. Once the export has completed, the Export History menu will open and show the export that you created as well as past exports, a link to the online export (if published to web), and the ability to download exports. You may also Publish or Unpublish your exports from this menu.

Something to keep in mind while exporting is that if you publish the export to the web and have selected all pages to be exported, you will also export your Home page. For navigation purposes, some users do not use the Home page as a landing page, so if they use the link to view the export online, it may come up with a blank page. If you do not have content on your Home page, it is best to export all other pages so as to produce a starting page that contains a generated sitemap allowing easy access to the remaining pages.

Normally, we don’t comment on other company’s products, but in this case we’ve received some confused messages from customers and prospects thinking Adobe® Proto and ProtoShare® are the same product. They aren’t.

ProtoShare®, first released in 2008, allows customers to create interactive prototypes of websites and other web software at any level of fidelity, from low to high, for any device, without installing any software. ProtoShare® also features true “collaborative prototyping”, in that using ProtoShare®, customers can ask questions and get feedback from stakeholders, make decisions, and keep a record of all collaboration in one secure place.

As best we can tell, if you install Adobe® Proto on your Android device (as it only works on Android devices at this point), you can create simple wireframes with limited interactivity and then send your wireframes to the Adobe Creative Cloud® to seek comments. I’m sure it’s a fine product, but it isn’t ProtoShare®.

We would have preferred if our friends at Adobe Systems Incorporated had chosen a name for their new product that wasn’t so similar to ProtoShare®. But they didn’t.

Here are features and capabilities you can expect from ProtoShare 6.2:

Mobile Prototyping

• Pre-configured mobile screen guides for popular mobile devices (both portrait and landscape views)
• View-on-Device feature – link your browser and your device to test a prototype directly on the device, then provide detailed feedback in your browser
• 2D and 3D animated transitions to simulate native applications with greater fidelity
• Access mobile stencils from a central resource

Other Updates

• Hi-res support for the Smart Image component
• New Link Mode in the Editor – quickly draw invisible links on design comps to create clickable design mockups
• New State Value Name component – show the active value of a state to explain what’s happening on a given page
• Add profile pictures and job titles to personalize your user account
• Container scrolling – easily simulate scrollable regions and panels
• Removed inactivity timeout – ProtoShare will attempt to keep you logged in as long as your browser window is open, regardless if you are actively using the application

The finishing touches are being placed on this release, so stay tuned for the official release announcement.

Also, we’re looking for current customers to beta the new release. 10 slots available. Contact Andrea at advisoryboard [at] protoshare.com.

In general, ProtoShare Professional costs about $50 per month per Editor, and ProtoShare’s Business Edition costs about $60 per month per Editor. Reviewers are generally included in both cases. (By the way, we’re running a special right now on ProtoShare Professional that takes the cost down to as low as $30 per month per Editor, but the sale ends March 31, so you’d better hurry.)

So, is ProtoShare worth it?

The real answer is that it’s only worth it if ProtoShare helps you make or save significantly more money than it costs. And, obviously, we agree with our many customers that it does.

ProtoShare does two things: it allows you to create interactive prototypes of web software and it lets you share these prototypes with key stakeholders to get feedback and make decisions, so you build the right software the first time. ProtoShare is designed to provide one repository for all project comments and decisions, so there is an easily accessible record of the decisions that were made and why they were made.

Our customers find that ProtoShare adds value in a number of ways. Use of ProtoShare helps our customers get through the “discovery” phase and define the requirements of a project faster. Using ProtoShare to track processes, feedback and decisions prevents lost discussions, keeps everyone in the loop, and ends the “re-litigation” of decisions. Collaborative prototyping with ProtoShare often produces a better product by encouraging innovation through brainstorming and rapidly exploring multiple approaches and ideas. ProtoShare also helps our customers better meet their clients’ and stakeholders’ needs by iteratively refining their products to their simplest and most usable forms. What are better products worth? For many of our customers, these “soft benefits” are enough to convince them that ProtoShare is worth the cost.

The Cost of Re-work & the Savings with ProtoShare

Thanks to the legwork of Gartner and Forrester Research, we also have some hard data to back up ProtoShare’s value. Research consistently shows that the cost of re-work represents 30 percent of the cost of the average software development project. The total cost of many software development projects is north of $100,000, so the “re-work tax” is often over $30,000 per project.

Our customers have found that use of ProtoShare results in an average of 70 percent less re-work because their key stakeholders can see and interact with a functioning prototype prior to the build. This interaction is much more effective than written requirements documents or static wireframes at eliciting stakeholder feedback and decisions. And since the discussions and decisions take place within ProtoShare, customers have a permanent record of what was decided and why.

Everyone’s business is different. Yours may handle many projects in a year, or only a few. Your projects may be larger than average or smaller than average. The value of ProtoShare to your business will to some extent depend on these variables.

To help you decide if ProtoShare is worth the money it costs, here’s what we call the ProtoShare Re-Work Savings Calculator. The calculator focuses only on the benefit of reduction of re-work that ProtoShare provides, without even considering the additional soft benefits described above. Plug in your own numbers and decide for yourself if ProtoShare is worth the cost.

If you’re like many of our customers, the answer will be an emphatic yes.