SensoryMetrics: re-inventing the User eXperience

When I started working for Bell Northern Research in 1988, my boss, Dick Penn had written a cool prototyping language. I mastered it. We were on Macs - then came Hypercard, and Supercard. In 1994 the world changed. Shockwave, Director, Flash, etc… Prototyping changed. But even today, prototypes still need walkthroughs…

Founder - Mike Padilla dropped us a note announcing a new era in prototyping - annotating them:

The idea for Protonotes came up from necessity. I’ve been leading UX teams involved in building web applications for nearly ten years and nearly every project team (comprised of project sponsors, business analysts, subject matter experts, project managers, developers, qa, ux, etc.) experienced huge innefficiencies in communicating system requirements. Some teams had bloated requirements with hundred of pages of useless use cases, some teams had sparse functional specs, most teams overused email as requirements glue. The protoype was usually the saving grace in that it served as the requirements hub. So I thought if we could use the prototype as the backdrop of the requirements conversation, and annotate it in context so that all project team members could participate, it could be a very compelling requirements tool. It also works great in heuristic reviews and usability testing to note and easily share findings.

There are quite a few web annotation tools out there, but all have one major macro-usability flaw in respect to my purpose for Protonotes - they require a browser plugin or a bookmarklet and often require each user to register an account. I believe this hurdle is not acceptable for project teams so I designed protonotes as an html application that only requires that the user has Microsoft Internet Explorer. Only one person has to register and he just has to email a single link to allow others to view/edit all notes.This seems subtle but I think is of primary importance.

We’re hoping to launch in early June. We’re in beta right now, soliciting feedback and getting some word of mouth out there. Everything is functional but we’re still finding a few niggles here and there.

Cool - we wish them best luck in getting their app out there!

Tags: Protonotes

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