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!

Related posts:

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

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

Giacomo ‘Peldi’ Guilizzoni, Balsamiq Founder and CEO opens our monthly marathon in wireframing applications! Witty and shrewd businessman, Peldi remains a passionate developer and experimentalist. Look behind the stage at Balsamiq – one of the most standout projects we’ve ever met: small dedicated team, antique cash-register, unique marketing approach with a lot of smilies. Continue the journey into Balsamiq headquarters with us and add your own questions!

CIO Happy Hour (CHH): Please introduce yourself and tell our readers and listeners in one sentence what Balsamiq is about.
Peldi: Hello my name is Peldi and I am the CEO and founder of Balsamiq, a small software company focused on adding flavor to web office applications. We like to compete on usability and customer service. Our first product is Balsamiq Mockups. Launched in June 2008, Mockups helps software designers and developers build great software by letting them easily sketch out their ideas, then quickly collaborate and iterate over them. Balsamiq Mockups has netted over $800,000 in sales in its first year of business and is gathering rave reviews.
Ok that was more than one sentence, sorry. ;)

CHH: Playing solo was always your goal and working for a big company was a part of the plan. What valuable experience have you gained working for almost 7 years for US Macromedia and Adobe that helped you lately? Why have you decided to focus on American companies, not European ones?
Peldi: Not a day goes by that I don’t use something I learned during my career at Macromedia/Adobe. Most of what I know about making and selling software comes from there, so it’s hard to give you a specific example.
I went to San Francisco right after graduating to look for a job there because Silicon Valley is “where the future is invented”…for a young programmer it’s still the place to be.

CHH: You’re a great contributor to Web Office idea. How do you see the concept evolution scenario? How and when it may go mainstream? What are the requirements for that?
Peldi: My definition of Web Office is pretty broad: “productivity web applications aimed at knowledge workers”, which of course includes word processors, spreadsheets, presentation tools but also wikis, bug tracking and project management tools, you name it. Basically it’s any the web applications you’d use at work.
While the term “Web Office” hasn’t really stuck with people, I firmly believe that as a whole it’s one of those “no going back” technologies: once you start being able to work from any computer, saving your data to the cloud, sharing and gathering feedback easily, keeping version history automatically…you will never go back to emailing attachments back and forth.
It’s just such a huge productivity booster.
I understand it will take time, my friend and former boss Dennis Griffin always said “inertia is an incredibly powerful force”, meaning that it’s really hard for people to change their way. See, another lesson from Adobe! ;)

CHH: As most of your users are professional UX and graphic designers, many of them would like to have a Mac application. While everyone and everything is moving into the cloud, do you think it’s necessary to invest into developing native desktop applications?
Peldi: We actually get all kinds of users, from the most technical to people who have never used a graphic program before. We are democratizing the process of wireframing! ;)
When I started Balsamiq Studios, I, too, believed that “everything is moving to the cloud,” and that desktop applications were on the way out. Mockups for Desktop, for instance, was not originally intended to be sold, but users practically begged me to sell it to them as a standalone application. And now, a year later, it brings in about 80% of our revenue. Demand for desktop applications is still very strong.
People want the flexibility to work online and offline. We all want the ability to work within a browser when we’re on the go and in a more native environment when we’re at our computers. I think in future every application will need to have a web version, a desktop version and a mobile version. Users should be able to save data both to the cloud and on the desktop. That’s what I’m working towards with Mockups right now.

CHH: One more futuristic question: Web Office will consolidate a lot of features via manifold plug-ins or web applications. In your opinion, there will be a great market for these products. Do you plan to launch new projects in this open niche?
Peldi: Yes. Mockups is our first Web Office plugin, which we are using to build a platform for our future products. All the efforts we’ve taken to integrate Mockups with Confluence, JIRA, XWiki, FogBugz, the Desktop and our own web app will be re-used for our future plugins. I can’t wait, it will be fun!
As for timing, we have no rush. I think we have about a year’s worth of development on Mockups before my vision for it is complete…after that, we’ll see. Our customers continue to give us great ideas for new products all the time! :)

CHH: You stated that you prefer to keep the company small and family-like. What is bad about being big?
Peldi: Oh there’s nothing bad about being big, I just don’t have any yearning to lead a large company right now. I also don’t feel like we need to be large in order to be successful…a small group of highly motivated and talented people can make a huge impact these days.

CHH: If you keep the same growth rate you’ve maintained for a while, by the end of 2009 you will have about 10 thousand customers. That’s a huge amount of work for customer service and support, which, probably, means new people in your company. Is it possible to remain a relatively small company with huge success?
Peldi: Ha! We’re at 8726 customers right now, and we seem to be doing OK. Mockups is such a small little app that doesn’t require too much support. We do get a lot of email every day, but we try to always get to the root of users’ questions and either fix the product or improve our website to prevent them. Valerie, Mariah and I are constantly improving and streamlining our processes, so that we have time not only to answer email, but also make it personal each time.
That said, I can see a day in which we’ll need to scale up our support efforts: we like to compete on great customer support so I’m happy to continue to be a support-heavy organization. I won’t try to save money on that!

CHH: Where are most of your customers from? What impact does it have on Balsamiq development?
Peldi: About 50% of our customers come from the US. Another 30% comes from the UK, Canada and Australia (about 10% each). The remaining 20% is scattered in 72 countries around the World.
I think it’s a pretty typical distribution for software products, and it definitely impacts how we do business. We route most of our sales through our Balsamiq Studios, LLC, which is based in the US, even if the development is done in Italy. Valerie, our COO, Wow! Division, is based in California, to better serve our American customers.

CHH: Do you still have the cash register sound playing when somebody is buying a new license? How does it feel?
Peldi: Yes, we do! It feels great, it’s a great motivator.
The only problem with it is that I need to remember to turn it off at night: our home office is right next to our bedroom, and because of the time difference most of our sales happen while we sleep! ;)

CHH: What’s your secret for keeping the software product simple and providing rich user experience at the same time?
Peldi: Ha! Creating simple products is very hard. The good news is that it can be learned: there’s a wealth of great books about it, and there are tools today that help you iterate quickly on your ideas…there’s one especially which I think it’s pretty good… ;)
Joking aside, my “secret” is to always think twice (no, three times) about adding any UI element to the application. Could the same feature be done without it? In other words, I really like “invisible” features and “progressive disclosure”, where you only see UI elements when you need them. The job of software is to support you in your work while staying out of your way.

CHH: A year ago you were hesitating about going SaaS, and it’s on your to-do list now. What have convinced you to move this direction?
Peldi: Like in most everything we do these days, the input came from our customers!
Many of our current customers want the same benefits they get from working in the cloud. At the same time, they don’t currently use any of the Web Office tools we plug into, like JIRA, Confluence or FogBugz.  We’re building a very light-weight “wiki for UI mockups” for those customers. It’s almost ready, and I’m really excited about it.
The Mockups web app is also a way for us to learn about selling a subscription service instead of license keys, which should be interesting.

CHH: What is your release policy for Balsamiq: you have almost weekly releases including bug fixes and improvements. What is the role of the users in testing and development of the product (we mean improvements, enhancements, etc.)?
Our release policy is to “release early, release often”. We always try to have a mix of bug fixes and little improvements in each release, so that the quality and power of the product go up gradually and together.
We are BLESSED with incredible users. There’s a core group of customers who are always ready to test new, half-cooked features and to provide feedback on them.
They also come up with great ideas for improvements, many of which we have implemented already.
Every time we’re thinking of building a new feature we mock it up and ask the community for feedback – some might say this is “design by committee”, but I disagree: we are the ones to make the final call, but our decisions are so much more informed by the feedback we’ve received than they would have been otherwise.
I want Mockups to feel like it’s a tool built by the people, for the people. We’re no better than any of our customers, we just happen to be the ones with our hands in the code! :)

CHH: You’ve never used a penny on “traditional” marketing and have been best-friends with bloggers. What (or who) was the impulse that made you ditch AdWords from the very start and adopt word-of-the-mouth strategy?
Peldi: I’ve actually started spending a little money in advertising – Google tricked me into signing up by giving me a $50 coupon, and I bit… ;) I’ve also sponsored a blog mostly because I want the author to keep at it. I love to read his blog! :)
That said, word-of-mouth advertising is the best because it’s the most powerful and it’s “real.” It’s also a lot easier for us: we just focus on making a product that’s worth talking about instead of scheming up marketing ploys… :)

CHH: Balsamiq is on twitter, delicious and several other social media resources. Is there a decent social media strategy at Balsamiq? How successful is social media in lead generation?
Peldi: What’s a “social media strategy”? ;) We’re on twitter, delicious and facebook because we like it, it’s part of our lives. We were already part of a community of people who care about designing great user experiences. We still think life’s too short for bad software, and we want to help rid the world of it. In other words, we go where our friends are.
As for how this results in sales, I’m sure it helps. Twitter is one of our top referrers, as well as another channel for customer support, which I know people appreciate.
Can you tell that I’m not too big into metrics yet? I just don’t have time for it, I’d rather spend time improving the product instead!

CHH: Peldi, thank you so much for this live and “real” interview. We are sure Balsamiq will continue its evolution in the right direction with its passionate users. Peldi, we wish you luck in all your endeavors and can’t wait to see the complete version of Web Office by you.

Our readers, please join the conversation and ask any questions you have and give us and Balsamiq your feedback! Meanwhile, we will be presenting another player later on this week.

Related posts:

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