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I was recently recommended Protoshare by some of the team here at c{s} and tasked with giving it a thorough look-through. I browsed the online docs, signed up for an account, and played around with it – here are the results of my digging:

Initial Thoughts:

Protoshare is tailor-made for what we do. I can’t ignore this – it seems almost too good to be true. Naturally, I was suspicious at first. My initial, gut reaction was “this is TOO simplistic. We’ve spent time refining our plans so they cop Drupal/slideshowpro/symfony to a T. This is a great idea, but one that probably lacks the finesse (extensibility, documentation, community) to be viable.” Well, I’m happy to announce that at least some of these fears have been assuaged (but not all).

Pros:

• It’s all online automatically, so client feedback/delivery is almost moot. This feature alone demands that we at least look at what protoshare is doing, and think hard about our current methodologies (which always have room for improvement).
• It provides for proofing of design comps – could be a huge process refinement opportunity, in terms of coordinating design/planning.
• It handles navigation and page wrapper templates beautifully. Clickable wireframes and auto-sitemapping are big plusses that aren’t really feasible/easy in our current, Omnigraffle-based scenario.
• It has generic enough components to allow the prototyping of nearly every kind of page (see note about components below)

Cons:

• I can’t figure out if it’s possible to duplicate/import projects. This would be a crushing limitation, because it makes each project essentially un-reusable. If this feature didn’t exist, I would be very surprised and disappointed. However, I’ve been through the app and the docs and haven’t seen any mention of it. How nice would it be to have a ‘basic template’ project that we duplicate at the outset of each project. In contrast, when you make a new project, it is EMPTY. All of the page wrappers need to be made by hand – not cool and, again, surprising.
• I can’t confirm that you can create custom ‘components’ – pieces of pre-built funcitonality that you drag onto a page/template. As mentioned before, the built-in component set includes a generic ‘box’ type that could be used for anything custom that you’d need to prototype. However, this is not a substitute for grabbing a slideshowpro and dropping it in.
• I can’t confirm that you can share ANYTHING across projects (assets, templates, components). This is a huge problem for me, because it makes the projects monolithic. I do a LOT of copying/pasting from existing plans. If there’s no comparable action in protoshare, I have a hard time investing much in it. Duplicating projects seems like a very reasonable feature to request, so perhaps a bit of pressure on the developers could get this implemented.

Conclusion:

Protoshare isn’t a silver bullet, but what is? The idea is awesome – perfect for what we do. The implementation is very good – but not perfect. The big Cons that I’ve listed are deal-breakers for the time being, but ones that might be resolved through additional testing/research or perhaps an updated of protoshare. We need to do planning as well as protoshare, with or without it!