Cross-Team Collaboration for Design and Development

Collaboration is a key element of successful design when working within a team. Fortunately, several powreful tools/platforms exist to facilitate much of the collaboration and they work wonders when it comes to documenting decisions, tracking progress and even providing a much needed spark of inspiration from time to time from others.

One of the best is Protoshare, a tool developed to combine collaboration with the real nuts and bolts side of website and Web app development - wireframing and prototyping. The latest release (Protoshare 6) is out today and the new version features a stronger collaboration engine with new workflows that aim to support team communication and better decision-making throughout the idea and project lifecycle.

New decision tracking features in ProtoShare 6 allow project team members to tag design elements, assign topic ownership, document decisions and track project status within a discussion thread. The tool's new interface enables users to filter and view the discussion threads that are most relevant and in its "Editor," where prototypes are created, users can now drag-and-drop images from their computer onto the canvas or into the page tree. This will be attractive to users as it carries the potential to help speed the building process.

"Collaborative prototyping enables UX, design, development and business teams to better focus on priorities and support the true purpose of prototyping: getting your work done," said Andrew Mottaz, founder, president and CTO of Site9/ProtoShare. "Getting it done on time, on budget and with the fewest possible headaches requires clear communication and effective decision-making. We've designed ProtoShare 6 to support that process through the entire idea-to-design lifecycle."