ProtoPie is a code-free prototyping tool that allows you to simulate real-life apps during a development process. (It earned the highest satisfaction rate among prototyping tools in the design tools 2021 survey.)

ProtoPie consists of three products. ProtoPie Studio is an authoring tool that you can make prototypes on macOS and Windows. ProtoPie Player is a preview app that runs on iOS and Android devices. ProtoPie Cloud is for sharing prototypes and runs on any modern web browser.

All ProtoPie users upload their prototypes into the ProtoPie Cloud to share with others. Then a new webpage is created that we internally call Pie page. Users can resize the prototype, toggle hotspot hints, set access settings, password-protect, handoff interaction specs to engineers, and many more on the Pie page.

The Problems

There are two types of users for the Pie page - Senders and Recipients. Senders want to share in different view setups according to whom they share. For instance, more controls are needed when sharing with colleagues and fewer controls for user test participants.

As you can expect, recipients can easily control prototypes if senders can intuitively set view options and access settings. So we decided to solve the senders’ problems first. There were three main problems they encountered.

1. Since the view options for senders and recipients were separated and different, senders had to do the same task twice to share.
2. Sharing process was unnecessarily long, and it was vulnerable to security mistakes by forgetting to set who could view it.
3. Interaction Recipes was an interaction handoff feature with high engagement, but most users didn’t know about it.

We simply named those three problems as 1. View Options, 2. Share, and 3. Inspect. We solved from 1 to 3 and other usability issues at the end. I led this project and worked with a talented product manager, UX researcher, and engineers. I used around 50 hours from discovery to user research, excluding meetings.