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!

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!

We’ve been really busy here for the last two weeks. Wireframing marathon is rolling smoothly and attracts quite a lot of attention. However, you can always make something better and we’ve compiled two helpful monitoring tools for you to keep an eye on wireframing and prototyping topics around the web. What is more, we are now all ears to your ideas at GetSatisfaction, added nice Facebook sharing button and Facebook Page (there are lots of  FB folks here), and created LinkedIn Group, so you can have a meaningful conversation with other pros.

Twitter search:
Twitter can do wonders when you ask it correctly. On the right you can see a stream of tweets related to wireframing that contain useful links. Plunge into it from time to time to grasp what’s hot on Twitter and what people are sharing. The direct link to wireframing twitter search:
http://bit.ly/wireframingtwse

FriendFeed Group:
After playing with twitter for a while, it appeared that there are far more places that people share info on wireframing and prototyping, and this content is good. We’ve used Yahoo! Pipes to create an RSS feed that sucks lots of information from trusted sources, removes duplicates and gives you a clean nice result. Yahoo! Pipes are editable, so if you’d like to tweak it and enhance with more resources you are welcome.
What an RSS feed is when you can’t comment and share it with others? Right! We’ve created a group CIOHH: Wireframing on FriendFeed that is also nicely displayed on the right, so you can track new items when you are on our website as well. Group is open for all, so go ahead – add your own great news or suggest resources we should add.

GetSatisfaction:
We’ve mentioned on Twitter earlier this week that we are even closer to you now. CIO Happy Hour Team will be glad to answer any questions you have and discuss your creative ideas on GetSatisfaction. See this grey Feedback button on the right? Click it any time you have a suggestion or a praise – we will take action as soon as possible and, best of all, everybody else can see your input and engage!

Facebook:
It appeared that there are many visitors, who come to CIOHH from Facebook. We adore our readers, and to make it easier for you FB fans, we’ve installed a one-click sharing button. There is also a CIO Happy Hour page on Facebook as well – drop by and say hi when you have time :).

LinkedIn:
As CIO Happy Hour resource spins around professionals it was a natural decision to settle on LinkedIn as well. New connections you can make with the help of LinkedIn do matter – it’s a brilliant opportunity to meet with great minds in your niche.

One more thing! We do need your comments and participation to make CIO Happy Hour truly what it should be – a conversation platform for professionals. Next time you are around, drop us a comment or even two :)

See you later this week with more interviews with wireframing market leaders.