Improve collaboration with clients using Prototypes

When it comes time to share your work with clients or stakeholders, securely sharing your Marvel prototype is easy. Prototypes can be shared in two ways: either by giving a client view-only access to your workspace, or alternatively by sharing a public URL. If your stakeholders have feedback, they can make any notes directly in Marvel using comments and annotations. That feedback will give you the input you need to iterate on your designs and get your product shipped quickly!

Feedback loops
When you're speccing out a product, you may want to gather the perspective of different people who are not directly involved in the design process.

There's the saying, "it takes different colours to make a rainbow"; meaning different perspectives are sometimes needed to make a whole product. Or in other words: diversity makes life a bit more interesting! From a project management perspective, this saying also applies; taking different perspectives into account can make a project more successful.

A designer might run with a brief from a client, but still seek sign-off from stakeholders from relevant departments who will want to see the designs and give their feedback. For example, a member of the Marketing Team in the company who is making the end product may see the prototype and notice that the colours of the prototype are not in line with the brand colours, or that there are no elements which indicate that there will be links to social media on the wireframe used to create the prototype.

By sharing a prototype with stakeholders before building the product, you may find you get useful insights into the end-product that you may not have considered. This creates a feedback loop, where iterations of the prototype can be worked on, looked at by other members of the team, improved on based on the feedback of others.

In short, consulting with a range of people on the end-product at the right stages can often lead to a faster, more efficient, and less costly build.

With Marvel, there are plenty of ways that you can share these prototypes with your clients, capture their ideas and build them into your designs. With every prototype, there is the option to share your work in a number of ways. There's the option to send a public link to the prototype via SMS, email, or by simply copying and pasting the link and sharing it however you wish.

To share your prototype via SMS or Email:

1. Select any project
2. Click 'Share or invite'
3. Click 'Send via SMS' or 'Send via Email'
4. Enter the phone number or email address

Once a client has access to a share link, they'll be able to get a real idea of how the prototype will look and feel to the end-user, and be able to share their feedback with comments or annotations on each screen.

To share feedback by adding comments, your clients can go to the project, via the Share URL, and add comments or annotations to each screen.

Signing off a project

Similarly, project owners, heads of departments, or people in C-Suite positions may also need to give feedback on a project, and see the finished design before signing it off.

Different people need different degrees of access to a project. Some users, such as designers on particular products, will need to have editor access, and won’t have access to others that they’re not actively collaborating on. There are also a subset of users who are not actively involved with the design process that will need visibility of all projects, but will only need to add annotations and comments to give their feedback.

With Marvel, it’s easy to make sure that access to view and edit confidential projects is only given to the people that need to see it through setting the right permissions at a user or group level.

User types: Team members and collaborators

There are two main types of users on a workspace: ‘team members’, which are usually colleagues, that are added to the workspace, and can be given ‘Editor’ status; and ‘collaborators’, who can add comments and annotations to all the prototypes that they’ve been given access to.

Invite -only

It’s possible to secure the projects within your workspace, making them accessible only by named stakeholders, by setting each project to be “Invite-Only.”

To restrict access to projects or folders on your workspace to users unless they’re invited, follow these steps:

• Go to the project or folder dashboard
• Click on Share (blue button in the top right)
• Toggle invite-only

Logging in to view prototypes

There’s also the ability to restrict access to confidential projects to people outside of your workspace. This means that you can be sure that only users that have been invited to your workspace can view the prototype from the Share URL.

To enable this, please follow these steps:

• Click on Team on the left menu
• Click Settings
• Check the box next to Require users to log in to view prototypes

Share by section

You may also want to only share a section of the project, instead of the complete project! This is useful for clients who will only want to see parts of the project which are ready for review, or a great way to conceal work that other people should not have access to.

To do this:

• Open your project with sections
• Hover over the title of the section that you'd like to share with someone
• Click on the white 'Options' button on the right-hand side of the page
• Select the 'Copy link' option on the drop-down box which is revealed

Password protection

Finally, you can also add Password Protection to your prototypes. This is enabled on the public Share URL, so clients with access to this URL will need to have the password to view it.

If there are any thoughts on the prototype that they may have, they can easily add comments to screens indicating that they're happy with what they say and that the designs are ready for handoff.

Pitching your project
Along with gaining feedback from your clients, a prototype can also be a great tool in demonstrating what your end-product is supposed to look like, and how it will behave once it's been built.

This is especially useful for very early-stage startups, who may be short on resources. A pitch for pre-product investment is always more compelling with something that looks and feels like a working product. And it also gives the founding team scope to understand what pitfalls they may face before building the product, and how potential issues could be overcome.

With Marvel, you can validate your ideas with data, to forecast how users may behave with an end-product, what the best design options were, and why certain decisions were made. The more objective data that can be given to an investor about every stage of the product's conception - the better.

It's also exciting for investors to be given something that they can see and play around with, as opposed to being given an idea where they'll have to work to visualise how impactful it could be in the future.

Embedding your prototype is one way that it can be viewed outside of Marvel, and having an embed on your own website can be a very slick way to impress investors in a presentation!

To embed an iframe of your prototype onto a website:

• Open any share feedback by adding commentsproject
• Click 'Share and invite'
• Click 'Embed' and copy the code

In summary, Marvel can support feedback loops, sign off and presenting ideas to clients. Bringing everyone into the design process and supporting collaboration. Sign up today to get started!