a blog on prototyping by pidoco°

It seems almost incredible, but UXcamp in Berlin exists for already 5 years now! Pidoco has been supporting the UXcamp from the very first days by initiating and growing the event. When we started back in 2008 we  were curious to find about 200 people interested in gathering for a weekend in Berlin to share all kind of things about UX with each other. The 5th time now there were more than 500 people coming from all kinds of continents, which feels just incredible to us.

UXcamp Europe participants in 2011

With growth comes always the question of how to maintain the quality of the camp for the next years. To me the main quality of UXcamp Europe is the Participant Experience, i.e. the reason why we can read statements like

• “The greatest week-end ever ! My 1st Time with You. And it was Perfect ! Thank You Team’s UXcamp #uxce13″ https://twitter.com/aznwizard/status/349071010814906368
  
• “#uxce13 was an awesome PX (participant experience). Thanks to the organizers. Question to myself: Why hadn’t I been there in 2012, 2011, …” https://twitter.com/g16n/status/349074814390120448
• “Had a #awesome #userexperience @UxCampEurope ! Thanks for organizing the #uxce13 ! very inspiring and motivating :-)” https://twitter.com/denkteich/status/349084391970070528
• “Had a blast at #uxce13! Thank you @uxcampeurope for a great weekend experience! I wish lectures at uni would be more like a barcamp :)” https://twitter.com/MAddin_M/status/349103227792420864

When we started to design the first UXcamp we took all our own experience from previous BarCamps and tried to figure out what is key to such an experience. It resulted in a whole lot of small details that we tried to execute to perfection while at the same time allowing for enough flexibility to encourage spontaneous ideas and creativity of the participants.

Being the first time this year that I was able to just participate I was able to observe all those small details. Many of them still work well, but others are at risk to influence the overall participant experience. During several discussions, the big question was the size of the event and whether it might be too large already. It is difficult to say what the best size is, but I had the impression that it was a little too large this year. Especially during the session planning on Saturday, the Audimax was overcrowded with people leaving no space on the stairs and still standing at the doors. Since the opening session is really important to establish the intended experience, it is also important that everybody is able to fit into the room.

The second big thing is the ticketing. First, I often heard people saying that you don’t need a ticket to come to UXcamp Europe, which is just not true. Yes, we never put anybody at the entrance to reject those without a ticket, but this is also one of the key parts to establish an open environment during the weekend. Therefore, we definitely rely on everybody to be honest with the tickets. Whoever thinks he or she can just appear at our UXcamp without a ticket I have to tell you that by this you are putting the participant experience at risk since otherwise the organising team might feel forced to hire security guys for the doors.

Second, this year tickets were gone within a few minutes such that many many people ended up in a huge waiting list. We feel honoured to see so many people being interested in attending UXcamp Europe, but on the other hand there are also many people who grab a ticket in first place but don’t show up and don’t return the ticket early on such that others might have a chance to make use of those tickets. Returning the ticket just the day before the camp is not very helpful since people have to organise the trip a few weeks in advance by booking hotel and flights. What could be a solution? Selling the tickets for a low price is one. However, this would brake the original BarCamp rules and therefore, it is not easy to decide for such a solution. Another minor improvement might be to open just a few tickets a time such that people have several opportunities for getting one. Would this help much? I can’t say. Maybe this is a point where the shear number of interested people is just too big for our venue and we have to live with the fact that many can’t take part every year.

Another thing that is always a risk for the participant experience: with so many people there are always a lot that just consume. These have to be remembered that a BarCamp heavily relies on the participant’s contributions. This time I didn’t hear of many such “consumers”, but I know there are. There are always things that have to be done during the event where the participants should give a hand to the organising team. It also should not be the role of the very same volunteers every year to do these things. I’d be happy to see all those “long-time volunteers” to be able to enjoy the whole weekend next time because there are enough others that willingly show up to help at the different spots, like the coffee bar, the cloak room, the help desk, etc.

That said, let’s all together work on maintaining the participant experience of UXcamp Europe to be able to enjoy the same unique spirit also the next five years!

Best regards,
Volker

This weekend we installed a new version of pidoco with an improved context menu. It is not a lot that has changed. For example, we now have simple check boxes for all those yes / no properties of the elements. We also improved the Target selector, which now contains collapsed folder entries and grows in width for long page names. This helps you find the target pages for linking even faster. 

In addition to the context menu, we also made a lot of changes in the background. With this new version we finished about half a year of work on many internal components that serves as a preparation for new features. Throughout the next months we will add several new versions that will allow for designing more interactions in your prototypes.

Until then we hope that you enjoy working with the new context menu!

Our Android™ app is now available to download in the Play store. 
With our app, you can simulate any prototypes you have created with our mobile-specific editor.
The Pidoco Android app is free to download and can also be used with our free trial.

We’ve updated our help pages with all the information on mobile prototyping in Pidoco.

For more information on creating mobile prototypes, read how the mobile edition works.
If you have any questions, as always you can email us at support@pidoco.com

We are back in the office after an amazing week at CeBIT! We are very excited to announce that we have won the INNOVATIONSPREIS-IT 2013 Award for best mobile product. Over 4900 companies applied this year to win the prize and we are honored to have such recognition for the Pidoco Mobile Edition. Our Mobile Edition allows users to simulate and test interactive app prototypes directly on mobile devices using the Pidoco App.

Source: http://www.innovationspreis-it.de

Below is an interview (in German) with our CEO Philipp Huy who was at CeBIT 2013 to accept the award.

We want to thank everyone who visited our stand at CeBIT and took the time to try out Pidoco. We are really happy with the positive response we’ve had. Here is a photo of our booth, including our analog magnetic wireframe stencils.

For those of you who were not able to visit us at CeBIT, we’ll keep you updated about upcoming events where Pidoco will be making an appearance!

We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes once again to bring you the features you have requested:

Flowchart Elements

Many of our users have asked us whether we can make it easy for them to create flowcharts in the tool. We’ve now added a flowchart section in the stencil palette, so you can map out your processes. Remember, you can change the size of your page in the context menu – so feel free to give yourself lots of space for your flowcharts.

Toggle Stencil

We also have a new stencil for your prototypes. Now you can use the toggle stencil to show and hide elements on your page. In the example below, I created a separate page with a few stencils and set this page as the target of my toggle stencil. Now when I click on the toggle stencil in simulation this drop-down appears. You can also set a target to external websites.

Our new flowchart stencils

Our new Toggle Stencil in action

Teams

You can now create teams in Pidoco. This means that instead of emailing everyone individually to tell them they have access to read or comment on a prototype, you can set up a team and automatically give them these access rights. Here I have selected the marketing team to have access to the prototypes in my folder. Now I need to click “Add to Collaborators”. I can set up new teams by clicking on the button highlighted in red. (Expert Plan)

I can select which team I would like to access my prototype

Project Folders

We realize it can be difficult searching through your prototypes, (especially if you have as many as we do). For this reason we have introduced folders in “My Prototypes” to help you organize your projects better. To do this, simply click “Create Project Folder” and click on the folder icon of your prototype to organize it into a folder. The same principle applies when you organize your pages into folders in the editor. (Expert Plan)

These are my folders – you can create yours by clicking on the blue button.

Once again, we want to thank all of you who have given us feedback on our User Voice Forum, or by email. We really appreciate it and we hope you enjoy these feature updates. Feel free to comment below, or email us with your feedback on these new features. As always, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter. Happy Prototyping!

At Pidoco we use our software for planning changes to our software and website. We’ve written before about how we use Pidoco in our work process for updating the software design, but we also use Pidoco to communicate about small changes to our website.

This week we’ve had a Halloween Special for new customers, and in the marketing team we thought about how we could let test users know about this discount. Rather than writing everything in an email, we made a prototype. This was shared with one of our designers and a developer, so they could give us feedback in the prototype about what was possible. The two main pages we wanted to make changes to were the Home Page and My Prototypes. We made screenshots of these pages, which we used as background images and then got creative!

We wanted to add an overlay to our existing image on the right-hand side of our home page. You can upload an image to do this, but we thought we’d use the free-hand drawing stencil instead. We were open to suggestions for Halloween-themed images from our designer, so the sketched look was useful in this case. We also added a couple of comments using our comment stencil to let our designer know he had freedom to choose his own images. Another comment marker was all we needed for the German translate of our overlay text and we could proofread this in the prototype itself.

Our mockup. We never said it had to look pretty

Fortunately, our final version doesn’t look like a mockup

Our designer created some images in CSS and then did some technical wizardry to make these Halloween-themed images move when you hover the mouse over them. We’re very impressed!

My Prototypes

We often include a box in My Prototypes to show our users about special offers. (Watch out for this in future). We added a white rectangle to cover the existing text in the specials box and included an image holder on the right, for one of the images from the home page to be replicated here. We also dragged in a text stencil, right-clicked and selected ‘styled text’ and then typed in the text we wanted and formatted as needed. Our designer then used this as a basis and made the changes using HTML. Simple!

Prototype of ‘My Prototypes’

Our final message in the repository complete with picture

If you’re working across teams, using a prototype can be a useful way of communicating ideas. Next time we have a special offer, I will just make a copy of this prototype and change the text and upload some different images. Please comment below about how you communicate changes like these accross your teams, or how Pidoco has helped you on your projects! Remember to look out for more Pidoco deals on our Home Page and My Prototypes section. Happy Halloween!

For more news about Pidoco offers, follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook!

We’ve made a couple of upgrades based on your Uservoice suggestions, so thanks for all your input!

Our first upgrade is the introduction of the Action Area stencil. If you were wondering where the Click Area stencil went, don’t worry, it’s had a change of name! We’ve also added the option to trigger this stencil simply by hovering your mouse over. To set the trigger mode for the Action Area stencil, just right-click on the stencil and select the option field. See the image below. This is a great stencil to use over non-linkable stencils and it shows up clear in simulation!

Now you can select hover or click

Our second upgrade is especially for our German-speaking users:

Für alle deutschsprachigen Nutzer haben wir unseren Editor nun auch ins Deutsche übersetzt! Es war ab und an schwierig, deutsche Namen für manche unserer Stencils wie unser “Rating Stencil” und unser “Mouseover Tab” zu finden. Auf jeden Fall sind wir offen für eure Namensvorschläge! Wir hoffen, ihr genießt es, Pidoco endlich auch auf Deutsch verwenden zu können.

Unser Editor jetzt auf Deutsch

Thanks for all your suggestions! We’re always looking for new ways to make Pidoco better. In the meantime, enjoy the latest upgrades! Viel Spass!

Hello, I’m Catriona and I’ve been working at Pidoco for the past six months. My main responsibilities are within the marketing and customer relations team, which means I’m often the first point of call if you have any questions about our product. I’m also the new voice behind our Facebook and Twitter accounts, so if you have any question you can always reach me through these streams.

I’m from the London area originally, but moved to Berlin after I finished my studies in German language and literature at the University of Sheffield. I found Pidoco just over six months ago and decided to take a position here as soon as I saw what a great team I would be working with. I may not have a background in UI design or HCI, but I’m learning about the world of wireframing and user experience all the time and am proud to be one of a growing number of women in the Berlin tech scene. What I love most about our software is that it’s so easy that people of any background can use it. I’m always happy to hear about large teams communicating effectively and collaborating on a project with Pidoco.

This is Catriona at UXcamp Europe, a must-go event for the UX community that we sponsored earlier this year

I want our social media communities to be places where people can write honestly about their experience with Pidoco. Feel free to give constructive feedback and support to others who are using our product. I’m always happy for people to post interesting articles about UX or any other relevant topics. I also would love to hear what you want us to post, so get involved, make suggestions and show us when you like something!

Feel free to message me and the rest of the team at support@pidoco.com with any questions or requests for a free demonstration of our software. I’m always happy to help!

Our new editor design finally went live this weekend! We hope you like our fresh new look and take advantage of its new features. We’ve updated the ‘My Prototypes’ section, where you invite others to view, review and collaborate on your prototypes. In the prototype creator itself, we have included new stencils (such as the much-desired “accordion” stencil – thanks to your feedback!) and updated our export function, so now you can specify the components to be included (or excluded) from your Word and PDF exports.

Our new UI design

To find out more updates about Pidoco, find us on facebook or follow us on twitter!
Until next time, Happy Prototyping!