Protoshare: Sweet Collaborative Wireframing

Protoshare is a full Web application that enables Web application teams to collaborate with clients and customers on prototyping Web sites. I'm a big proponent of prototype-based development, but one of the drawbacks to this methodology is that there aren't a number of really good tools to facilitate the process. Those that do exist are desktop-only and somewhat expensive. Protoshare enables you and your team and your clients to build out protoypes completely online in a surprisingly rich, drag-and-drop environment with smartly integrated commenting and discussion.

Where Protoshare really shines is in the wireframing layout process. They've done some very impressive work with JavaScript on the browser, and the very rich UI is fluid and responsive. Even more impressive, you can make your wireframes fairly interactive, utilizing RSS for dynamic data display, or menu drop-downs or flyouts that really let you and your clients see the workflow, rather than just talk about it. You can certainly build HTML prototypes that do the same thing (and we do!), but Protoshare helps to automate that process.

I've been looking at it as a way to enable our team and our clients to work remotely and still collaborate effectively, and I think it meets that requirement. However, as most of my team and our clients are all within a short walk of each other, I'm not sure that the fees (which are not steep) and the lock in to the product are worth the investment. We can also generate richer prototypes on our own, but certainly not as fast. If our designer/developer team and clients were more geographically dispersed, Protoshare might be a great tool for us to use. I think the product is really excellent for smaller design shops or independent designers who want to collaborate with their clients without driving around (or flying to) a lot of meetings. I don't know if you'd use Protoshare to protoype a fairly large corporate intranet, but I think that aside from not being able to handle the full scope of AJAX-based interactivity (though you can address that by building Flash movies and inserting those in to the Protoshare wireframe), it's a very capable tool. (Though I would like to see real-time audio communication built in to the tool. It's very, very useful to talk through the workflow with collaborators, rather than just post comments asynchronously.)

Interestingly, Protoshare requires that you use Firefox 3. While IE is almost fully supported, Firefox is what you need to be using to fully engage with the application. It's unusual for almost any Web-based application to require Firefox over IE, but that's what they've done. I'm not sure that this isn't a problem, as home business or corporate clients may not want or be able to install Firefox just to collaborate with you. They may just ask that you meet with them in person instead.