This post is inspired by a conversation with one of the winners of the UXBite competition, Tomek. We were talking about various wireframing tools and one of the things Tomek said caught my attention: I was trying to work with ***, but I felt like they gave me a hammer and now I’m obliged to only see nails around me. That made me thinking.
We are being limited by the names we give to specific objects and tools. We are being limited by our habits. We are being limited by habits of other people. And we are being limited by our own usual ways of using certain tools.
For example: what you can do with a hammer? First thing that comes to mind: hit the nails with it of course! What a stupid question?! But as you keep thinking you can find different ways of using a hammer. You can hit nails with it but you can take them out of wooden boards as well. Or you can kill someone with this tool. Everything depends on current needs.
I know that you may be thinking prototyping / wireframing tool is only for wireframing or prototyping. Period. Today I want to show you a little alternative way of using JustProto. How? See below.
Product Retrospect.
Product Retrospect is a simple yet effective way of summary after the project’s closed. You gather the whole team and discuss every pro and con that’s project related. You don’t point fingers saying “You screwed this up by not talking to me earlier” but say “This was badly executed due to lack of communication”. Sometimes when your team is spread all over the world it’s extremely difficult to do this kind of project retrospective – time difference and gathering everyone on the same page is hard. JustProto’s collaborative features come in handy in this time of need:
- Multiple Collaborators,
- Real-Time Collaboration,
- Chat,
- Project Preview with just One Link,
- Live Preview.
How it works?
Each JustProto account have an Administrator/Owner, who can grant access to others – The Collaborators. Each Collaborator gets his unique login and password to login to the project at a certain time. Using nothing else but computer with Internet access everyone edit the same project at the same time and everyone see all changes in the real time (that’s the Real-Time Collaboration).Kinda like on Google Docs while editing the same spreadsheet or word document.
Each person choses note, tag or pin color they like and that’s that – by editing its text Collaborators – The Team add their point of view on a closed project. What is important – everyone can talk on a project Chat. Smart history will save all the conversations. This way everyone’s up to date even if the Internet connection dies: Chat history and current version of the retrospective is saved and always available online.
Any person who is not on the project team but gets the Preview Link will see the retrospective project. Let’s say your boss is not one of your project team but you’d like him to know the results of the retrospective – send him a Preview Link and that’s that!
What’s even more fun and handy and cool – if a person who get the Preview Link will open it while you and your team edit the notes, they will see everything in the real time too thanks to Realtime Preview! How the project retrospective can all look like? See here.
This example shows that you don’t ALWAYS need to stick to the tool’s purpose. Don’t be limited, try thinking of other ways you can use the tools you like : ) What it also shows is the fact that wireframing tool can be helpful not only while design happen – it can also become pretty useful after the project is done. Remember that the tool is just a hammer. You don’t need to see nails everywhere.