ProtoShare

ProtoShare 3.9 Preview: Reviewer’s Mode

Posted: June 2, 2010

Another big change coming in ProtoShare 3.9 is the user experience for Reviewers. When ProtoShare 3.9 goes live, Reviewers will all see a different interface than they do today. Our main goal for this change is to make reviewing as simple as possible, and to focus Reviewers on the prototype with minimal interference from the UI.

What do Reviewers see pre-3.9?

When Reviewers sign-in to ProtoShare the first thing they see is the Project selection screen. After they open the project they want, they see a screen like this:

We received a lot of feedback that this screen was too distracting for the average reviewer. Reviewers didn’t know what to focus on and tended to get frustrated.

What will Reviewers see in 3.9 and after?

We took a first step at fixing this in ProtoShare 3.8 with the streamlined View Design mode. In ProtoShare 3.9, we are making this the only mode Reviewers see.

Now when a Reviewer signs in, they see this:

Furthermore, if the Reviewer is only a member of one project, they will bypass the Project selection screen and go directly to the screen above after logging in. They can even take it a step further and completely hide the ProtoShare toolbar by clicking the right-most button.

Once hidden the toolbar can be brought back by hovering over the same right-most area and clicking on the button that appears.

Not just different, more powerful

Just because the Review UI is less busy doesn’t mean it’s less powerful. All of the existing panes are available using the toggles in the ProtoShare toolbar. In fact, you can even toggle on the Page Documentation, which you couldn’t do before. With all the panes open, Reviewers will see this:

How will this change affect my Developers and Reviewers?

Developers can see this mode if the click the View Design button in the Design toolbar in Prototype Mode.

For Reviewers, this is the only mode they will see now. If your Reviewers are used to the old view in Prototype Mode (first screenshot up at top), it may take them a few moments to realize which buttons show which panes. All the toolbar buttons have tooltips that appear on hover, and Prototype mode and View Design mode use the same icons. We don’t think it will take Reviewers too long to adjust to this new view. In fact, we believe Reviewers will feel much more comfortable with this view and they will be able to concentrate on reviewing and giving feedback.

Our internal teams, and everyone who’s tried this, love it. Once we started using the improved View Design mode, we found that we all switched over to it for reviewing content. Let us know what you think.