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.

To configure Animation effects:

1. Select one or more components and open the component inspector.
Locate the Animations section, and expand it, revealing the On Show and On Hide settings, as in the picture below:

2. Choose an Animation effect
Choose an effect from the On Show or On Hide pop-menus. You may set only one, or both. The default setting is automatic, which means that it will do the opposite of any chosen effect. For example, if you choose to slide down when the component is shown, it will automatically slide up when the component is hidden.

Format As Mobile:

When you create a new Design or inspect an existing Design using the Get Info action, you have the option to format the design for mobile development. Checking the Format as Mobile App checkbox ensures that your design will be rendered at 100% size on your mobile device and that the device’s browser will not be allowed to change the viewport scale. This ensures an app-like experience for your mobile app prototypes.

Screen guides:

Specifying screen guides for the editor allows you to place components at an appropriate location on the canvas, prior to viewing your Design on your mobile device.  To choose screen guides use the View->Screen Guides sub-menu and choose the dimensions that best correspond to your device.

Once you have chosen your screen guides, red lines will be drawn on the canvas to identify the right and bottom edges. If you choose guide dimensions that correspond to a mobile device, you will be prompted to format the Design for mobile if you have not already done so. If your Design does not have any components yet, the  blank-canvas message will be displayed in the center of the guide region, as in this picture:

View On Device:

Once you have begun adding components to a mobile Design, you can quickly preview it on the target device using the File->View on Device action. You will be presented with a dialog like this one:

1. Navigate to the provided URL
Navigating to the provided URL on your mobile device’s browser will load a page which prompts you for a PIN to authenticate and synchronize your session.

2. Enter the provided PIN
After entering the provided 4 digit PIN on your mobile device, your session will be automatically synchronized, and a link will be displayed that will load the active Design on your mobile device.

Note: For convenience, it is useful to bookmark this page on your mobile device. This page will be the same for all of your Projects.

Saving this page to your mobile device’s home screen provides quick way to link your Designs, and allows you to view them full-screen, with no browser controls ( on supported platforms ).

3. Test your Design
Once you are viewing the Design on your device, you can interact with, and navigate around the prototype as usual. If you need to refresh the Design on your mobile device after making a change in the editor, simply use the mobile browser’s refresh action.

If you want to view a different design on your mobile device, navigate back to the page you bookmarked in step 2, and click the View Design link. If your session has expired since the last time you viewed a Design on your mobile device, you will need to enter a new PIN.

To Mark Decisions:

1. Select the Topic
Select the Topic in the Topic Listing for which you want to mark decisions

2. Mark each reply that represents a decision
Hover the cursor over the reply to be marked as a decision. A Decision checkbox will appear. Select the Decision box.

To Resolve a Topic:

1. Select the Topic
Select the Topic in the Topic Listing which you want to resolve.

2. Mark Resolved
In the Topic detail pane, below the message body, click the Mark as Resolved button. Alternatively, you can use the Mark as Resolved action from the File or Context menus in the Topic Listing. Using the menu actions allows you to resolve multiple Topics at once.

To Archive a Topic:

1. Select the Topic
Select the Topic in the Topic Listing that you want to archive.

2. Archive the Topic
In the Topic detail pane, below the message body, click the Archive button. Alternatively, you can use the Archive action from the File or Context menus. Using the menu actions allows you to archive multiple Topics at once.