Friday treat for our readers: Victor Hsu, founder and PM with Axure, answers our questions today. Victor explains how Axure fits into “more with less” conception, points out that MAxure is a top priority, defines next steps in Axure development, and shares his vision on the business domain evolution and application portfolio management.

CIO Happy Hour (CHH): Please introduce yourself and tell us what Axure is.
Victor Hsu (VH): Hello. I’m Victor Hsu and I’m one of the founders of Axure and the product manager for Axure RP. First, thanks for the opportunity to be a part of CIO Happy Hour.
Axure is a small, diverse team of people who love building and using good software. We make a tool called Axure RP which was one of the first tools dedicated to wireframing and prototyping web sites and applications.

CHH: When you launched the very first version in 2003, who were your competitors? How would you describe your market position now?
VH: In 2003, most people were using tools like Visio, Illustrator, or Dreamweaver to make wireframes and click-throughs. Everyone seemed to know that prototypes would be really helpful, but the time and skill sets needed to make them just didn’t fit into most projects. Axure RP helped people bring prototyping to a lot projects by not requiring code and speeding up the process enough to fit into existing schedules.
Today, there are many more options, everything from simple sketching tools to “enterprise” solutions. We’ve continued to focus on giving our customers the features they need (and ask for) to reach their best designs while keeping it in a package that’s accessible and makes sense.  We’re happy to be able to say that we now have customers in over half the Fortune 100 and thousands of small and medium business all over the world. And super happy to have customers who like what we do enough to offer training, organize a global online user conference, and build files and libraries to share with the community.

CHH: How would you describe the typical Axure user? How collaboration trend has changed the vision of Axure product? Are you planning to develop a shared projects concept or there will be other collaboration solutions?
VH: The typical Axure user could be an independent consultant that does everything from design to code, or a UX professional creating cutting edge designs at an interactive agency, or a business analyst at one of the largest companies in the world.
Collaboration has been an important part of our vision for some time now. In April last year, we released a feature called shared projects so multiple people could work on an Axure RP project at the same time. As a bonus, it also keeps a history of the project so you can, for example, see what your project looked like a month ago. This has become an essential feature for many of our customers. We will continue to improve shared projects and look for ways to bring others into the process.

CHH: In recent versions Axure provides versatile library of elements and widgets, it’s impossible to cover everything. For example, the prototype of financial application cannot emulate arithmetical interactions which are essential for such a type of application.  What’s your position here:  to update the library with new releases, to give the capabilities to develop javascript-based interactions, crowdsource?
VH: We’re going to be adding more widgets and interactions, but providing ways for customers to create and share their own widgets and interactions is the ultimate goal. The custom widget libraries feature, which lets you make your own libraries, was a step in that direction. It’s really impressive and fun to see the things customers are making. We’re seeing widgets we didn’t even know were possible!

CHH: How is MAxure going? When do you plan the release of Axure for Mac?
VH: Maxure has been a long time coming. It’s going surprisingly well and I can’t wait to get it into the hands of our customers. With a little luck, we’ll have something to demo before the end of the year. You can keep track of our progress at axureformac.com.

CHH: Let’s talk about the trends in the world of prototyping tools. While all solutions are trying to meet a new standard “more with less”, Axure remains a very heavy application for mostly professional usage.   Do you see any other evolution for Axure except prototyping?
VH: I’m a big believer in “More with less”. If a paper sketch is enough to get the right design delivered, it doesn’t make sense to spend time doing more. We’re going to continue to make Axure RP better and faster at “less”, but still make sure that when you need it, “more” is there. Prototyping is our sole focus right now. There are many opportunities to deliver value up and down stream, but I believe that focusing on prototyping today will provide the most benefit to our customers.

CHH: Talking about SaaS vs desktop application: what benefits Axure provides as a desktop application and are there any plans to invest in online version?
VH: Some of the frequently mentioned benefits of desktop applications are the ability to work offline, a more responsive user interface, control over your data, and less risk for downtime. Of course, SaaS has its benefits too, and we’re very interested in online services that will bring those benefits to Axure RP customers. An online version is still on the table, but we don’t have immediate plans.

CHH: What else is on Axure development roadmap?
VH: I think you can get a pretty good idea by taking a look at the “Suggestions for Future Releases” thread on the Axure RP forum (www.axure.com/forum). But let’s focus on shipping Maxure first, and then we can talk about the next version :).

CHH: Do you envision development frameworks as rivals?
VH: Development frameworks can definitely be used for prototyping. But I think many projects and teams get more from a faster, less complex prototyping process that everyone can contribute to rather than the potential for code reuse. And as more and more companies continue to recognize the value of good design and user experience, there will be less of a “if it doesn’t go in the final product, don’t do it” thinking.

CHH: Axure is a well-known brand. Do you use social media as a tool for further branding or rather lead generation?
VH: We were a little late joining Twitter and Facebook, but now that we’re there, we’re happy to have another way to listen to customers. We’re seeing these tools help our customers connect with each other too. I’m not sure if social media is the place for companies to be doing lead generation, but so far it seems like a great way for people to recommend products that they love. If we focus on making that kind of product, then I think social media can only help.

CHH: Being a major trendsetter in wireframing, how do you see the next years of the business domain development?
VH: First, thank you for calling us “a major trendsetter in wireframing” :) As more and more teams adopt wireframing and prototyping and we continue to learn how to get the most out of it, we’ll see more best practices evolve around when and how to use them. Along with that, will come solutions that more closely tie prototyping to the already well established parts of the application lifecycle.

CHH: Hsu, it was our pleasure to interview Axure. CIO Happy Hour wishes your team a speedy deployment of a Mac version and even more happy users.

Related posts:

1. Experience Functional Wireframing with Justinmind
2. Wireframe, Collaborate and PM with iPlotz
3. Wireframing Dialogue with ProtoShare

The next interview in our Wireframing Marathon is held with Mark Vernon, the owner and founder of iPlotz. Mark’s latest app has very quickly attracted many users by providing not only online wireframing and prototyping possibilities, but also project management part. Mark shares his vision on a perfect wireframing solution and ways to build one, hints that there is a new long-awaited feature to be launched in several weeks.
CIO Happy Hour (CHH): Mark, could you please briefly introduce yourself and tell us what iPlotz is in one sentence?
Mark Vernon (MV): I’m the founder of iplotz.com , which offers both an online and offline wireframing and prototyping application.

CHH: You started iPlotz development a year+ ago as internal tool? Even at that time there were some other mature competitors in wireframing e.g. Axure. How did you define your niche and whether has your vision changed since you’ve started?
MV: There were a couple of products out there like Axure and Omnigraffle but these were desktop apps, not suitable for online collaboration which I wanted to use between our USA office and our offshore developers. Since then the vision hasn’t changed too much, just adding features as users ask for them.

CHH: In January after 2 weeks of launch you reduced the subscription price. Price changes always cause negative feedback: when they go down, the older subscribers don’t like that they have paid more.  Tell us about your experience with pricing tactics.
MV: At that point we didn’t have any paying subscribers so that wasn’t an issue – I don’t think we need to change pricing now, but if we ever do, we would always offer a refund to existing users, or some other method of compensation.

CHH: iPlotz supports a lot of languages including Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew, which broadens your audience.  Who are you main targets geographically?
MV: As always, the USA is the biggest market, but for offshoring many developers are in China, Russia etc, and it makes sense for them to be using local variations. It’s very easy for us to add new languages, so no point in limiting our market geographically.

CHH: Since you’re updating iPlotz with new features on a regular basis as well as fixing bugs, QA questions pops in mind.  How effective is bug hunting done by your clients? Is in-house testing more efficient?
MV: It will always be a mix of clients finding bugs and us tracking them down. Users have so many different ways of doing things, that unexpected bugs are found. However, we are working a lot more on finding and fixing bugs before release of each update. This means the updates may come less often.

CHH: iPlotz is designed as a tool for making lives of web designers and developers easy. So far none of the solutions on the market can respond to the need of converting graphic wireframes into HTML/CSS mock-up to test complicated interactions.  Do you have such a feature on a to-do list?
MV: We have been working the last 2 months on HTML export, and this can be seen on our staging server at http://iplotz.com/staging/ – Should be released in the next couple of weeks. We have also started to make components interactive to improve the prototyping within the application itself.

CHH: Your competitors are trying to hit the enterprise market with hosted versions of their tools, integration connectors, etc. How do you see an iPlotz’s users in a year: who they are and how iPlotz helps in their work?
MV: We are finding a lot of companies with 5 or more users signing up, which makes sense since that follows our own profile as users. Now, we are currently creating a complete project management web app to go with the AIR app, so that companies can manage workflow better. As more and more work gets done remotely or between different offices, we want to create the tools and sites to help manage it all.

CHH: iPlotz has reached the semi-finals of ‘The Best of RIA 2009′. Our congratulations! Did you employ any special tricks to achieve such a great result, or is it simply users’ tribute to a great product?
MV: I’ll claim the 5th amendment on that… :) Suffice to say, it was fun to participate and the end result was extra traffic and more people using the product.

CHH: iPlotz is on twitter and several other social media resources. How do these tools help iPlotz? What is primary usage of social media? Is it a decent lead-generation source?
MV: Twitter allows us to keep a real time view of what people think of iPlotz, and we also keep en eye on search keywords to track competitors and user needs/questions. As long as you are helping users and not spamming them, it’s a fairly good lead generation tool.

CHH: Investments: Are you going to attract massive investments for the further development of iPlotz? Can you share the new features we can expect?
MV: We don’t need massive investment, but in any case I am the source of any financing. After the next release we’ll be concentrating on the project management features and usability features of the actual application. Anything more will be as a response to user requests.

CHH: Mark, thanks for the answers and we look forward to see iPlotz evolving into an ultimate prototyping solution!

Related posts:

1. Wireframing Dialogue with ProtoShare
2. Experience Functional Wireframing with Justinmind
3. Diving in Prototyping with Axure

Please meet HotGloo – the youngest player on the market of wireframing applications. Wolf Becvar, Marketing and Communications with HotGloo, will tell short, but inspiring story of HotGloo. Innovations, focus on pro-users, future pricing plans, unique features, agile development based on users’ feedback and much more in this interview.
Tip: the audio recording has some bonus material inside.

CIO Happy Hour (CHH): Could you please briefly introduce yourself and tell us what HotGloo is?
Wolf Dieter Becvar (WD): Hi, my name is Wolf and for the last six months I have been responsible for all  HotGloo communication and marketing. I work together with Hannes, who is the godfather of HotGloo and in charge of programming of the app, and Michi (in charge of the HotGloo screen design). It actually started as a diploma thesis at the FH for Media Computer Science in Wedel, Hamburg and was realized back in HotGloo with the support of superReal (Neue Medien GmbH), where Michi and I are employed.

Basically, HotGloo is a web-based wireframe application. A tool to create conceptual interactive prototypes of a website in an early project development stage.

CHH: You position yourself as “designed by IAs for IAs”: what tools did you use before releasing your own product? What innovations does HotGloo introduce in comparison to these tools?
WD: We started off using Keynote, then we switched to Axure, then we tried new stuff  like Protoshare, but these tools didn’t feel right for us. Don‘t get me wrong, they are nice, they have tons of functions but they all lack usability. They just don‘t have this look & feel experience we wanted. At the time, Hannes was writing small apps for superReal and the idea was born to finally build our own wireframe app.

First thing we had in mind was that our app had to be web-based and it had to be smart. The era of downloading and upgrading has hopefully passed – web-based is a lot simpler. You don‘t have to worry about updates, hard drive space, compatibility troubles, program crashes and so on. We knew web-based alone wouldn‘t be very innovative, plus a bunch of other mockup apps were launched that time. We sat together to think up something that could be used as a key feature that we thought all the other apps lack.  Ironically, we were put our ideas into a Mindmeister map and bang there it was – INTERACTIVITY & REALTIME COLLABORATION. I admit we are still working on RC, because that‘s a tough one, but the great thing about it is that you don‘t have to export your wireframes, you just invite the people you want to collaborate with or clients who can review the  workflow – in realtime.

CHH:  What will be the pricing plan for HotGloo services and when do you plan to launch fee-based subscriptions? Maybe, you have an innovative revenue generation scheme in mind?
WD: We have been talking a lot about the pricing system lately. We are currently thinking about monthly subscriptions with different plans. There will be a demo or 30 day real free trial. Maybe we will come up with something completely different, who knows? All that I can say for now is that HotGloo will stay in beta for the next two months.

CHH: An extremely predictable question, but it has to be asked: web service vs. standalone application, how do you see the market evolution?
It seems that the market was heading towards web-based services long before most of us even noticed. First thing I remember is friends using Gmail, not in the Mail client but web-based. Hard disc space is getting less relevant. Even operating systems are downsizing, it seems that there is a big movement towards “Less is More”. Plus most machines are constantly online nowadays. The technology has come so far that RIAs are being developed, which have the same functional range as standalone applications and the same look and feel. Why download a software, the whole installation hassle plus annoying updates. You don‘t have to download, upload, upgrade, downgrade, save, delete, there is nothing to worry about! You are start using HotGloo the next day and surprise, we‘ve updated it whilst you were sleeping.

CHH:  What are your expectations on the number of users after the first year of launch? Why should they try you, and what will make them stick with HotGloo?
WD: That is hard to predict, we don‘t calculate like that, we are not accountants. We program and design stuff we would love to use and we take a close look at our beta tester feedback. Why you should give HotGloo a try is because we are not a big software company, we are just a bunch of guys having fun creating something we love to use. We listen, reply and take action. If someone suggests a good idea, we implement it.  And it turns out that most of our users have a similar background, they are designers, programmers, IA`s, UX, project managers – all people we are working with every single day.

CHH: Right now it looks like anyone with no experience in UX design can jump-start using HotGloo. However, it’s designed to be used by professional IAs with high demands and sufficient expertise. How will HotGloo match their expectations as a primary target audience?
WD: To get started, we decided to arm HotGloo with basic elements which are intuitive to operate. We are in a constant feedback loop with our users and try to make HotGloo better every single day. Lately we have been getting questions about the HTML export of HotGloo pages. If there is someone out there who wants to build a plug-in we are happy to let them. We are not going to do it ourselves, because at the moment it‘s not the direction we want to take. Plus I think we would bore ourselves to death.

CHH: What are your plans for further service/product development: low-fidelity, interactivity and demonstrations, high fidelity, site maps and flow charts, full product life cycle? What niche is right for HotGloo?
WD: At the moment I would say HotGloo is perfect for low fidelity wireframing – highly interactive to create a fully functional & conceptual prototype. We will see what the future holds and we don‘t want to commit ourselves to a specific niche. We don‘t want to exclude the possibility that in the future you can also create high fidelity prototypes, picture use case scenarios in order to display complex workflows even more effectively and easier.

CHH: Besides your beta users feedback you have strong competitors, whose ideas and paths you can use.  What is your strategy: follow and offer service at a lower price or innovate?
WD: As I mentioned before, we built HotGloo primarily because there were no applications living up to our expectations. We don‘t want to follow, we want to innovate. This does not mean that HotGloo will be a high priced application.

CHH: Being a relatively new brand, HotGloo’s brand visibility is quite low. How do you plan to use social media tools for promotion and gaining visibility?
WD: We have quite a lot of confidence in word of mouth marketing. We try to spread the word via Twitter, Facebook, our company blog, Friendfeed, content related blogs, and searching for reviewers etc. We don‘t have a lot of financial marketing capital, so we are using every channel we can find. And it‘s working we have about 3000 users betatesting HotGloo, and this number is constantly growing. We are also planning to expand our expertise, travel to usability conferences and talk about our experiences, getting in touch with people.

CHH: Congratulations! HotGloo scored surprisingly high in ‘The Best of RIA 2009′ for a just-launched application. What’s the secret?
WD: Thank you!  We are work hard, constantly improve and we have high expectations towards design & usability, plus we are small, we can adapt very fast.

CHH: Wolf, thanks for the great interview and we are looking forward to meet again in a year to see how well you are doing!

You’ve got more questions to HotGloo’s agile team? Ask them now.

Related posts:

1. Wireframe, Collaborate and PM with iPlotz
2. Diving in Prototyping with Axure
3. Experience Functional Wireframing with Justinmind

Today we feature an interview with Stephane Carrez – head of Planzone’s R&D Department and Architect. Stephane will tell us about Planzone’s ambitions and plans for the near future, how the team works, what social media tools Planzone is using and how the company managed to become a success on a crowded market in a year.

CIO Happy Hour (CHH): Could you please briefly introduce yourself?
Stephane Carrez (SC): Gladly! My name is Stephane Carrez, I am head of Planzone R&D team and architect of Planzone.

CHH: Stephane, in several words, what is Planzone about?
SC: Planzone is about creating an easy-to-use online collaborative workspace, where all project data is centralized and can be shared amongst the project team. Through the internet, this workspace is accessible to all parties no matter the time, location or language. In short, Planzone is the perfect Internet application for a comprehensive “Management by Project” approach to group activities. It is easy to use and to learn, without the need to be an expert project manager to be proficient. We also chose to deliver our solution as a SaaS (Software As a Service) application because we don’t want our users to have to install and maintain a piece of software before they can get to work.

CHH: How did you manage in such a short time starting only a year ago, to be more competitive than your mature rivals like Basecamp for example?
SC: In its time, Basecamp had set a standard in terms of usability and simplicity. We absolutely loved it at first sight but we rapidly grew frustrated by its limitations. The focus of Planzone is more towards being productive by providing the right combination of tools to manage multiple projects with different groups. Since our experience and references in this domain are different to Basecamp, it is hard to make a comparison. We run our own race.

CHH: Nowadays project management goes together with document management, collaboration and many other activities. How do you solve the dilemma – either to provide a simple project management tool or extend its functional scope, but make it heavier?
SC: Our focus lies in the synergy between project management and collaboration. Every feature in Planzone is analyzed in terms of customer relevance, complexity, and expected usability. One of our goals is to keep Planzone as easy and accessible as possible, while using the standard Internet infrastructure. This results in higher accessibility, efficiency and adherence.

CHH: FLEX and Silverlight applications seem to be the next generation of applications. Will Planzone have a desktop version via AIR engine or a similar solution?
SC: FLEX and Silverlight are amazing technologies we follow closely. We will probably integrate some FLEX components in our service for example to have interactive multi-project reports. In the short term however, we have no plans for the development of a desktop application. The ability to work “offline” on project data could be an important feature so we keep that option open.
We have a very open architecture and the Planzone API is a component that could be used for implementing such a desktop application. In fact, with our API, anybody could write such application (although it could be complex).

CHH: Palnzone is developed by project management pros with outstanding background in software projects. Does Planzone fit the description of «best of all» for IT businesses?
SC: IT departments, IT services companies and R&D organisations are a big part of our traditional client base. These customers often require specific functionalities to run their processes and manage their businesses. Besides functional depth, these customers require first-class product usability to facilitate adoption with their staff. Satisfying these different requirements is one of our strengths.
However, Planzone goes beyond the specific needs of IT businesses. In fact, Planzone is used by all sorts of organizations, from marketing and sales agencies to headhunters, venture capitalists, construction firms, relief organisations, government agencies, universities, students, churches…
Planzone usage really flourishes, when different departments within any organisation decide to work in a true transverse manner, while being capable to include outside parties in their projects processes. This is project collaboration inside and outside the enterprise firewall.
For example, imagine the business development team of a large retail chain in charge of opening new stores. They need to collaborate seamlessly and efficiently with their financial, HR, sales and marketing departments while connecting with external consultants, agencies and suppliers at the same time. When you can collaborate on projects “inside and outside the firewall”, it is a beautiful form of efficiency.

CHH: Who is a leading the project developer? What kind of crucial skills one must have for making the product successful? What is the role of users’ feedback?
SC: One key objective for Planzone was to create, test and launch new product functionalities in a very short time-frame. We also wanted to involve our R&D team beyond their usual responsibilities and have them take full ownership of their work by participating actively in our product roadmap. For these reasons, we adopted an Agile development methodology. We have a very flat structure in our R&D departments and developers are working in teams on specific subjects.
In order to make the product successful, you have to manage a delicate balance between marketing and sales investments, your R&D roadmap and what evolutions you perceive in the marketplace. You constantly have to ask yourself: are we creating value for our customers and does it make sense for our target market? The only way to know this is to constantly work with your customers and get their feedback.

CHH: Have you thought on integrating Planzone into big platforms? You have your own API, so it seems like a great natural next step.
SC: We agree. We are releasing the Planzone API gradually. The latest development has been the Firefox plugin, where one can access the personal to-do list instantly. We are also working on new add-ons and our goal is to have a full API released before Q2 2010.
Integrating Planzone into big platforms is possible but before we need to see a real customer need.

CHH: Has been SaaS model successful for planzone? Do you think this approach will change in the near future? If yes, what’s coming?
SC: The SaaS model has been extremely successful for Planzone. From a user perspective, this is an almost perfect model:
No upfront costs. Cheaper to adopt and manage than offline software;
No hardware to buy or manage;
Easier to use because of the internet infrastructure;
Software is always up-to-date.

CHH: Augeo Software, the company which is the owner of the Planzone solution also markets Augeo5, an enterprise project and portfolio management software. Do they compete in some way in the market?
SC: We had many debates in our company whether Planzone would compete or not with Augeo5, our enterprise product. Both products play in very different market segments and their delivery model is also different. Planzone is a pure SaaS product while Augeo5 is sold like any other traditional software. Augeo5 is also installed on client’s premises while Planzone is hosted in secured data centers.
We concluded that both our Planzone and Augeo5 products would benefit from each other. One key reason Planzone has been successful from the start is due to our extended market knowledge coming from our experience with Augeo5. Conversely, Augeo5 is also taking advantage of innovative technologies we developed for Planzone.
In the end, our customers will decide if our two products compete with each other. They seem to agree with our dual approach though. In fact we have now several customers that are using both Planzone and Augeo5 in their organization.

CHH: Everybody is going mobile now. Does Planzone have plans to step into this direction?
SC: Yes. We have noticed the market trend of instant real-time information to everyone concerned. We are developing mobile solutions for Planzone. It is one example of how we play into new evolutions.

CHH: How do social media tools help you in your everyday work? What tools would you advise everyone to use?
Popular tools in Planzone are Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and various messengers. While there are benefits to having company-wide chat possibilities, there is a danger of losing focus and using these tools in a compulsive manner. I guess it really depends case-by-case on the person, function and company.
CHH: You are using Twitter and several other social networks to promote Planzone. Are these tools productive?
SC: A lot of these tools’ productivity is creating awareness and brand recognition. Often it is hard to quantify how much effect they exactly have, since a lot of their effect is psychological.
The way I see it, these tools are free, take almost no time to use and give visibility to the service. That’s why we support them.

CHH: What is your product path for the coming years?
SC: Key elements that define our product path are: client feedback, technological and market evolutions, product flexibility and general ease of use. Many of our customers are “always on” meaning they want to access their project information and communicate with their team members almost at anytime, from anywhere and using many different devices. We are conducting several initiatives to support this kind of nomadic work style. Today, our work does not stop at the office door and we need to take these evolutions into account.

CHH: What are your ambitions on number of subscribers for 2009?
SC: We worked on Planzone for two years before launching in June 2008. Our software company has been publishing Project and Portfolio Management software for over 18 years. We have the unique luxury of a motivated and international client base that gives us an enormous amount of input. We combined all of this with our passion for new technology and our desire to reinvent ourselves. The result is Planzone – a product we are very proud of.
Our growth strategy should be viewed in the context of the Internet, where people have a near-perfect market information about products, prices and user satisfaction. Therefore, more than focusing on an absolute number of subscribers, our goal is to make an increased number of people from very different backgrounds understand how much they can benefit from using Planzone in their business or personal life and have them spread the word.
Excited and happy users result in an exponential growth – especially on the Internet. Today, we have over 8′000 users and we expect to double that in a few months.

CHH: Stephane, thank you a lot for the interview! Such a great product on the market as Planzone has a lot of potential. We are sure you will achieve a double of subscribers in a few months and will meet the coming year with a new great set of features and even more possibilities for your customers.

Related posts:

1. Wireframe, Collaborate and PM with iPlotz
2. Experience Functional Wireframing with Justinmind
3. Glue Your Ideas with HotGloo