Please meet a creative team, which brings you ProtoShare. Blake Johnson, Josh Chaney and Peter Uchytil tell us what collaborative prototyping is about, discuss advantages of pure HTML/CSS+Javascript solution, hint on iPhone app coming and future ProtoShare roadmap, give advice on how to select the right wireframing tool and much more.

Audio interview has a lot of bonus content packed!

Sasha Kovaliov (SK): Would you please introduce yourself and tell us in several words what ProtoShare is about?
Blake Johnson (BJ): Hi, my name is Blake Johnson, Vice President of Business Development and co-founder of Site9 company.
Josh Chaney (JC): I’m Josh Chaney, Managing Director of ProtoShare. ProtoShare is a collaborative web-based prototyping tool for web sites and web apps. And the keyword is here “collaborative”, it really facilitates the whole discussion not only on the prototyping base but throughout all the development process from brainstorming, wireframing, design work, and even on the actual build phase.
Peter Uchytil (PU):  My name is Peter Uchytil, Product Manager. With ProtoShare we’re enabling discussion around the project so you could make sure that you’re building correct things.
BJ: We came from different backgrounds of Site9 which is a parent company of ProtoShare. We started as a web development company ourselves back in 1999, 10 years ago, and we did database-driven complex websites up till 2005 when we had developed a platform which we deployed ourselves, we called it “Launch Platform” and it helped to expedite interactive development. We decided to market that to get some venture capital and become a software company. We found some success, however, part of problem was it had a CMS built-in and a lot of larger companies wanted to have their own CMS solution. Our product also had some prototyping aspects built-in that a lot of people liked. So in 2008, last year, we broke out the prototyping aspect, and decided to make a SaaS application. That’s the short story how we came out with ProtoShare.

SK: ProtoShare is more a web development-centric solution, what are the modern tools of a web developer and what is the role of ProtoShare in this toolset?
BJ: If you get the tool you will see that it’s not just for web developers, it’s also for project managers, and art directors because you can review a creative concept online, project managers can come in and monitor where the project is, information architects can build out the prototypes, and stakeholders can be invited (management, marketing, clients) and participate in the dialog.
JC: There are really 2 parts of ProtoShare: the review process which is extremely simple, created for stakeholders, who don’t have time to learn the product (the number of reviewers is unlimited), and the developer’s part.
PU: A modern web developer certainly plays several roles nowadays and in larger organization these roles are going to be distributed among several people: user experience, design, information architecture, site structure, building the site itself. All those different roles can be fulfilled by a single person in a lot of cases or a couple of people, and ProtoShare addresses all those different roles.
You also can keep the client in the same system for other activities, for example for email campaign to review the message. If you need to look why the decision was made you also can go back to the history of the project and find relevant records, and we think it’s a great advantage.

SK: We are talking a lot about collaboration today. How does ProtoShare team collaborate with their users and gets their feedback for further development?
BJ: We’re on Facebook and Twitter, Linkedin and Youtube, and we do all the social media things that we can do, we monitor searches and anything about wireframing and prototyping. We gather feedback from all the users of the product, and a lot of the current features we have due to the feedback we have from the customers.
PU: When ProtoShare was still in beta we did usability testing. From the day one we were trying to get users’ and community feedback for better product design.

SK: You’ve just mentioned that you’re one of the oldest wireframing web app. Web is changing constantly – what emerging and existing trends do think influence the process of wireframing and prototyping and how do you reflect them in ProtoShare?
PU: The trends in wireframing right now are all about “doing more with less”, things that let you save money, make sure you can move the project forward. Tools become easier to use and access, which is especially important for customers. Regarding web trends in general we’re not really chasing the trends, because that’s the way to stay behind them. If you’re trying to build your own wireframing application you can do very sophisticated web actions, but then the problem is that you are going to spend a lot of time working with it. It’s a really a hard place to play. We think that we did tools so that people can describe the behaviors that they want on the web site and push the project forward.
BJ: If we were in any trend right now, which we mentioned earlier, our product does fit well with agile project development philosophy, rapid prototyping, and involving users.

SK: Peter, here I hear it again “more is less”. A lot of online applications are getting really popular because you don’t have to install or upgrade anything, just go to the web page and you have your working application. However, a lot of people nowadays still prefer to have an offline application. Do you think that you’re going to make an offline version of ProtoShare?
JC: Earlier we had it on our roadmap. Right now we’re a web-based application and to make it offline requires serious development work. We wouldn’t like to spend development time on those features instead of building a more sophisticated product and reaching more customers.
BJ: Technologies are emerging, they are still immature, the idea is awesome, and we have a request for that. But you have to be careful with this trade-off between online and desktop apps.
PU: I think that it’s also something that people are getting more and more comfortable with: online apps and cloud computing. Web developers and design agencies are going to be early adopters of the whole cloud methodology so it seems like a good fit for us.
JC: Before developing an offline application we may to prefer to develop iPhone version to allow reviewers to comment on wireframes.

SK: Being a totally online application has limitations on browsers. As we checked yesterday the browsers that are supported right now: Firefox, IE, and Safari. Do you plan to support any other browsers (e.g. Opera, Chrome)?
PU: There are 2 sides of ProtoShare:  for developers and for reviewers, and review side is sort of client-facing and there are no any browser limitations. The reason we haven’t done extensive testing in Opera, for example, is simple: we take into account market numbers too. Each browser that we have in testing rally increases testing time, so if we are going to support it will take a lot of efforts. Unfortunately, there are still browser differences between PC and Mac. Our long-term goal is to have 4 browsers support for everything as soon as it’s viable to do: we have limited resources. For example IE’s and Firefox’s Javascript is just one huge difference. Our customer base of web designers use primarily Firefox and that makes a lot of sense to develop with Firefox in mind, making sure that review can be handled in all the browsers.

SK: At the very beginning you mentioned that your product is built in CSS/Html/JavaScript. If you have built it in Flash or Flex it would work in all the browsers.  Why did you make that choice?

PU: The original technology is based on other product “Launch” and at that time it was Html/Flash hybrid application. We pulled Flash out and left HTML, we really feel that the html nature of ProtoShare allows us to do things that others don’t do or just can’t do easily. For example, we can use CSS to do the styling of components, and we were told that web developers just love that. It takes a little work to get there, but if you’re an advanced user this is not a problem.
BJ: We can reveal what we’re planning for our next release: we call it html sand-box.
PU: It will allow users to extend ProtoShare in any way they want. If they want to support a certain component they don’t have to wait us to build it, they can build it themselves. And that’s not kind of thing you can get from Flash-based application.

SK: Are there any other innovations which are coming with the new version?
BJ: We’ve just had a release but we’re planning to improve review and project management aspects of application, to make the processes more robust and suitable for larger companies.
JC: With the last release ProtoShare 3.5 (August 23^rd, 2009) we’re really facilitating collaboration throughout the whole web development process.
http://www.protoshare.com/ProtoShare-Benefits/

SK: Here is a bit tricky question. There are so many players popping up in the wireframe apps market. You’re not a new player here. Can you give any tips to our readers how to select the best wireframe application for their needs?
JC:  The reason that you build a prototype is that you so can get feedback and start a discussion so you can make refinements during prototyping phase, rather than doing rework at the backend, which makes it more expensive.  When it comes to choosing the right tool everybody has different needs so I’m not saying that one tool can fit everyone. But my only suggestion would be, when evaluating these tools ask yourself some questions: am I creating a prototype to generate a discussion and gather feedback,  is access easy for my stakeholders at all the points of the process, what this tool offers now, what’s its potential for future.

SK: Guys, thanks for the great interview and ideas you’ve shared with our readers. Protoshare is truly and amazing product, and we are sure you’ll make it even better!

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.

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.

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!

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.