wireframes & usability

The first European UXcamp will open the ticket lists on next Wednesday, 3rd of March. Be prepared to register and grab your ticket since we expect the tickets to be gone rather soon. However, there will be two separate lists, one for all Germans and one for our international guests, so there should be enough tickets for all foreigners. If you need some advice for booking your trip, please don’t hesitate to ask us.

To all of you who plan to give a presentation or workshop, please have a look at our Session Forum and add a note on what you want to talk about. We hope to see some very exciting sessions!

This weekend, we added some new things to pidoco. First, you can now pay in dollar directly with a fixed price. Since many of our test users live in the USA, we thought this might support you. There are no more exchange rates to consider or some special fees from your bank for paying in Euros. Prices start from $9 per month and user. You may want to have a look at the complete pricing list. The free trial remains with 31 days which you can use to extensively test pidoco.

The second thing we added are custom stencils that you can create. We thought the most likely case is that you want to have elements in your own style. Therefore, all images that you upload or add via URL are automatically added to the stencil palette. From there you can use them just like you use the other stencils: simply drag them onto a page. That not enough, we made all images linkable. You can set a target just as you do for a button or a link. This way, you may create and use your very own buttons in a pidoco prototype. Since some pictures may be rather small, you can give them a name that is visible in the palette to distinguish similar looking images.

This is only the first step in adding custom stencils to your prototype. What would you like to be able to do regarding custom stencils? Let us know, either by leaving a comment in here or by adding your idea to our feedback forum.

To start a great new year we have rolled out a brand new product which nicely integrates with the Pidoco Prototype Creator: the Remote Usability Tester.

Take one of your prototypes and do a Usability Test with zero set up time. You start a test session by simply inviting anybody via an eMail just as you would do for letting them view or discuss your prototype. There is nothing more to do for technically preparing a test session. You meet your test participant online within pidoco and can watch exactly what he or she is doing with your prototype. Via either a typical phone or our integrated Flash phone you can talk to each other to apply proven Usability Methods like “Think Aloud Testing”, but this time online from wherever you are. During the whole test session, everything is recorded automatically for playback. Take your time and replay the session as many times as you need to analyze what your test participant did and said.

Using the Prototype Creator and the Remote Usability Tester at the same time, you can test small modifications to your prototype with a test participant watching you. This gives you the unique possibility to apply Usability Methods like “A/B Tests” or “Wizard of Oz Testing”. Prototyping and Usability Testing can go hand in hand for the very first time!

Read what others say about our Remote Usability Tester.

This not being enough, we also added a long requested export to Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org. With just one click you can add text notes to every element to specify and describe your prototype in great detail. All these notes are rendered into one document together with images of the Use Cases, Pages, and Layers of the prototype. All your discussions will be added to the document as well in order to keep track how design decisions evolved over time. Every single piece that is not visible on the pages is described in more detail, like link targets or menu structures. Special Highlight Images show the building blocks of your prototype. You can download a sample document of our homepage prototype.

Take the exported document as is or use it as a resource to write your very own specification document. We know it is a quite difficult task to create a document that satisfies everybody’s requirements. With this style of document we hope to support all of our users in the best possible way. However, please don’t hesitate to approach us with recommendations and ideas of how we can improve the word export.

Starting today, the word export is included for free to all our users. In case you don’t have an account yet, register for a free test account now.

Dear All,

we here at pidoco˚ love xmas and this is why we have a very special offer for you:

When you place an order for any of our plans, before Dec. 25th we double your uptime!!

Buy one month, get one free – buy 6 months, get 6 months for free!!

No matter how long you book in advance, we will double your booking period without any additional cost!

Simply click on the Santa on your right or go to: https://pidoco.com/en/xmas2009-en and sign-up for this amazing xmas deal!! Hurry!

This is not an actual post. This is only to verify our claim token with Technorati so you can find us there too!

And the Token is: U97XBUT3RBSX

Dear pidoco° users,

we have included a new payment option for you.
If you need pidoco° for a specific project which lasts for a fixed period (e.g. 2 months), you can now pay for that exact period and not have to worry about cancelling your subscription.
Simply pay for your desired time (starting from 1 month) and use pidoco° without worrying about cancellation periods.
Simple, effective and tailored to your specific needs!

Your pidoco° team

Dear everyone,

we usually work double shifts to make your pidoco° experience even better. Now, we are proud to present you with a few additional features and bug fixes! In order make make your prototyping & usability testing even better, we have included some features which should aid the overall communication with your co-workers.

From now on, when opening the Remote Usability Tester,  you will be able to re-play, fast forward and skip through the test session via the new timeline function.

It also includes the new annotations feature which can be used for making notes on-the-fly whilst conducting a Remote Usability Test. This way, it will be easy to jump back to the exact point in time where your test user experienced certain difficulties or where you think that specific changes are needed. Simply re-play your test session at a later point and jump straight to the annotations in the timeline -easy, quick and convenient!

pidoco° timeline function

You probably are know that the Remote Usability Tester is based on a live one-to-one telephone module which gives you the option to either use a normal land line telephone or the integrated FLASH module. Well, we have had several petitions and now we decided to include a real-time chat module. This way, you can run a usability test even if you do not have a telephone or microphone at your disposal.

real-time chat

Since we’re already talking about chatting:
in case that you are in need of further guidance, have some questions or if you simply are in need of human contact – why not chat directly with us? You now can make use of our integrated pidoco° chat where you can get in touch without needing to send out lengthy emails nor having to listen to our charming German accents over the phone!

chat with pidoco°

Last but not least we have done some extensive bug-fixing and you should notice a definite increase in performance when using the Prototype Creator.

We sincerely hope that you can enjoy the new features and the increase in performance and hope that your work-flow will be even better.

Your pidoco° Team

An important notice to all Blog readers:

You may have been with us before the era of pidoco°.
We have now fully switched to our new name pidoco°.
Starting from 8 p.m. (CET) on the 30th of October, we no longer have the old domain and will therefore no longer support RSS feeds for our old domain!

Please make sure to update your feed to:

http://wireframe-usability.com/feed

Thank you and hope to welcome you back soon!

Your pidoco° Team

These days we celebrated the third birthday of the pidoco project. For a short presentation, I searched my harddisk for old screenshots, pictures, designs, etc. It was a lot of fun to see how our Tool matured over time. The first lines of code were written three years ago.

I would call this my masterpiece of graphical design. Well, in first place, I wanted to explore the possibilities of SVG. Therefore, I added the very nice gradients, ignoring which color exactly I used. The whole app was written in SVG, even the slider and combo box, which you may see on the top right. The red and green arrows were our toolbar icons, which even had a fisheye effect! (I still don’t know, why we remove that gimmick…) I even found an old version of the sources which I was able to deploy on our test machine to play around. The next major version was the introduction of the ExtJS library, which made pidoco look like this (December 2007):

With this step, the application made it form a prototype to a real app that was, to some extent, usable. Our very first beta testers use pidoco with this look. To be honest, we should have paid them for the pain they had using pidoco… But we learned a lot and further improved both the interaction design and the graphics design. Here you can see an intermediate draft, which looks quite similar to the current version (compare: https://pidoco.com/preview):

While others do prototyping, you can do UCD!
pidoco° makes Usability and Usability testing easy! Today, we proudly announce the beta release of the brand new Remote
Usability Tester! Now, usability testing is really feasible and affordable!

From now on, all our current and future customers with the Classic & Advanced subscriptions will enjoy the full capabilities of the pidoco° remote usability tester.

pidoco° Remote Usability Tester fast facts:

• you can perform hassle-free usability tests from your desktop
• complex setups for usability testing are now history
  
• real-time usability testing via audio connection, screensharing and mousetracking
• all test session are recorded and available for later use
  
• make ammendments to your prototype while conducting usability tests with the user
• test user will be able to work from home (natural surrounding!)
• you can test your design concepts and find usability problems effectively

Experience how the Remote Usability Tester can change the life of your users for the better!

Just log-in to find more information in the project repository.
The future of a more usable world starts here

test user view

moderator view