I did a quick comparison/scan of some of the other apps in the wireframing category and chose to take a deeper look at Pidoco. I had a few questions when getting started and was able to instantly access someone via chat at Pidoco, which was very helpful.

The user interface is fairly intuitive. Everything is drag and drop. The sharing/collaboration feature is really nice. Anyone who has access to your wireframe can add comments.

Pidoco helped me do exactly what I needed:

1. Create a functionality wireframe (not focused on design at this point, but somewhat with layout and importance of elements).
2. Link everything to simulate the flow of the actual website.
3. Collaborate with my biz partner and make updates real-time.
4. Insert notes on things we’d like to change or clarify.
5. Make final updates & share with our designers for next steps.

Overall this is a great tool. I recommend checking it out. Any questions, please feel free to email me at: shannon.dooman@gmail.com.

DETAILS (for those who want them)

Overview:

Pidoco has helped create a clean wireframe that will give our designers a clear idea of how our site should function. Our goal was to flesh out some of our own questions, make decisions on final functionality and pass to the designers for next steps. This will hopefully eliminate the back-and-forth I’ve experienced on projects where we didn’t take sufficient time to plan site functionality as a precursor to design. Everyone has his/her own interpretation of how something should work, which can cause inefficiently in the design/development process. The wireframe makes the functionality clear to everyone. Now our designers can focus on what they do best.

Also, I signed up for the 30-day trial, so I didn’t have access to the usability tests module.

Tips:

If you are planning a new website, this tool might pair nicely with a mindmapping tool. We used mindmeister to map out some ideas and transferred those ideas into a wireframe. We found this to be a very useful approach.

Cautions:

The site jammed up several times when I was doing a lot of cutting/copying/pasting. I had to log completely out to resolve the problem. In the application, it appeared that nothing was happening, when in fact it was working. This caused me to have a duplicate or misplaced cut/pasted items that I had to clean-up.

When trying to drag your mouse over multiple items to select them, the page will not auto-scroll so you can select items that are not already visible. Workaround I used was to adjust my browser setting or use an alternate method to multi-select, such as CTRL+SHIFT.

Stumped:

I haven’t figured out how to simulate a pop-up Window. Instead I created a new page and layer with the same name under the use case to act as the pop-up. I linked the layer back to the originating page, so it appears to pop-up and then close. This isn’t ideal for layers that appear on several pages however, because you can’t link from layer to layer, you can only link to pages. There is probably a way to do this, I just don’t know how. If anyone finds out, please share.

Very quick review in case it saves someone time. This is a tool specifically for content wireframing (planning content, sitemaps), not for wireframing site functionality and structure. This wasn’t clear to me until I signed up for the free trial and started to use it with my original intent.

As a side note: I saw two things I liked during my brief encounter with JumpChart:

1. The edit button/slider, which follows your scroll and when clicked opens a menu.
2. New feature that allows exporting a template into Wordpress.

 Any suggestions on a good tool for wireframing site functionality?