Feedback with Protonotes with Axure
Often gathering feedback from a variety of client stakeholders can be a time consuming process. You send over wireframes or a prototype with an accompanying spreadsheet to help the client collate and de-dupe their feedback.
Then with any luck you get the spreadsheet back with nicely collated feedback that you then have to interpret. Inevitably there are some points which need further clarification and emails and calls follow.
What normally happens is your spreadsheet gets ignored and you’ll get some emails containing feedback with various people copied in and discussions begin… which gets very confusing and you’ll probably end up having a long call or meeting to sort it all out. All very time consuming indeed.
I’ve been trialling a way of allowing feedback to be put straight into a prototype. Protonotes is a simple system to put post-it notes onto html pages. No plug-ins or software needs to be installed. Some clever people have a found a way to integrate this easily with axure prototypes.
There’s a little app which inserts the appropriate protonotes code into the header of the prototype. You then get the protonotes feedback bar at the top of the prototype – you can also alter the settings of this.
I’ve only used it a couple of times so far, but it’s proved a much more engaging and effective way of gathering feedback.
Read More30 seconds of usability testing…
>And Empire online would spot something on their movie review pages which will be frustrating visitors to their reviews pages.
I clicked through three or four reviews thinking “their film reviews are the shortest I’ve ever read – too short in fact”. Only after about the fourth page did I spot the big red link “Read The Full Empire Review »” immediately below the star rating.
Truth be told I they’ve noticed this problem and have tried to address it by making the link bigger and brighter – which unfortunately makes it look more like part of the advert and so probably makes the problem worse.
A few simple steps would improve this loads
- don’t put an ad just below this critical link
- don’t make the link so shouty as it just looks like an ad
Ad
Not ad
Nice Imperial War Museum site
>
We just recently launched a small but lovely site for the Imperial War Museum. The site supports a new gallery at IWM London created to showcase and celebrate winners of the Victoria and George Cross. The new gallery, paid for by a £5million donation from Lord Ashcroft contains the world’s largest collection of VCs.
My role was research, requirements gathering, strategy and design of the layouts and so on. We went through a fairly standard process of requirements gathering and definition, sitemaps, sketch layout followed by wireframes in Axure. I built a light prototype in Axure and this pretty much served as the functional definition meaning that only a small amount of follow up functional definition was required.
Key to the site were the flash based story animations. For the prototype I used simplified placeholders to represent these with the key user journeys to clarify where the stories were to take users.
Through production there were some compromises and things which weren’t quite as I’d have liked them, but overall it’s a great site to have been involved in. Best of all IWM invited us to the private viewing in London with many Victoria and George Cross winners present which was mighty humbling.
Well done to Rich, the usual e3 suspects and Wendy. If you get the chance the gallery is well worth visiting – the stories are absolutely inspiring, humbling and extraordinary.
Long time no see
>I have not blogged for sometime. I have been insanely busy on two major projects. I have become a husband and moved house. So all in all I’ve tended to use twitter now that I’ve been time poor.
Today I actually managed to read some stuff on the internet at lunchtime. This caught me eye… Google could run virtual ads on actual billboards in Google streetview.
“In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads.”
Is this how the Matrix starts?
Read More>Protect the Human Shortlisted for award
>The site I produced for the fine folks at Made by Many and Amnesty International UK has been shortlisted for a New Media Age Effectiveness Award which is rather exciting. It would be amazing if it did well, we did work bloody hard on it!
It’s top of the list as well, I’m sure that’s a good omen and nothing to do with Amnesty and the letter A.
See the quite long short list here: http://www.nmaawards.co.uk/Shortlist.aspx
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