HotGloo is an online wireframe application, that can be used for designing wireframes of web projects. By paying HotGloo a monthly fee, you get to use their online application and construct a sharable wireframe of your web site.
The advantages of using this application are improved communication and collaboration with colleagues and clients, and also getting a clearer picture of the outcome of the project and providing a framework for designers and coders to work on.
The idea is interesting (however not by any means unique). Their pricing (7-48 USD/month) sounds reasonable and at least they promote to have hundreds of customers in 60 countries. At least at first sight their product might very well be functional – so I think it deserves to be in the competition. I don't think HotGloo has a chance of winning the competition, but I don't see why it couldn't win the online web projects category.
The idea is very much interesting. I would love to know how this was picked to be in the competition in the first place! What makes it different from Mockingbird and other mock-up tools we talked about in User Experience Design when it even looks the same as some of the programmes we went through?
ReplyDeletePlease, Nelli, ask Johanna or Henri about Mockingbird and when doing the interview ask the designers why is their design better than anything there already is!
Does this seem similar to Hammerkit?
ReplyDeleteI guess Antti and Aleksi could answer that question better.
It seems very useful and packed with potential, and it has something web developers really would need nowadays to make their work much easier concerning collaboration with other devs.
Hey there,
ReplyDeletethis is Wolf from HotGloo, trying to answer your questions.
I'm afraid the first question hast to be addressed to someone else, I can only guess: I guess we got picked, because HotGloo was developed out of two diploma thesis, one dealing with computer science, the other one with innovation and communication plus we took a complete different approach towards the topic of wireframing: HotGloo is fully interactive, which makes it stand out from all the rest of the tools. We chose to offer a web-based version only, because of the interactive side to it, plus of course the collaborative part. Our design is also quite unique, we just didn't simply take the Flex toolkit and paste it into the app, we spent quite a lot of time on element skinning and on the overall design part of the app.
HotGloo should be fun and easy to use, yet offering really smart and advanced functions, which makes it a really competitive concept tool.
Our friends at Hammerkit (hey Mark!) have a complete different approach. We see HotGloo as a concept tool for wireframing/prototyping with the benefit to build fast and easy interactive prototypes - not finished design layouts.
Hope I could answer your questions and thanks again to Nelli for doing the interview in Graz.
Regards,
Wolf
Hi Wolf!
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for your answer! :D I find the question I asked quite interesting from the students' point of view, because you said in your presentation that you started to develop HotGloo in 2008 (do I remember it corrctly). So, in two years the number of mock-up tools have multiplied, when more and more people want to get their homesite in the net without too much trouble. (Or at least that's what I would imagine.)
So, what do you do, when you are developing a new innovative service for years and then when you get it published, there are already several others of the same idea? (This doesn't apply only to HotGloo but all the other services and applications as well.) Naturally it goes to the question of marketing and cunning ways to get your message through. But for us students I think that's a good thing to keep in mind, too. Many things change in our branch already during a half a year!
Totally right, speed is one of the most important things nowadays as we experienced as well. Get it done, get it out and finetune later on. But it's also about finding your niche and differentiate from the others - f.ex. we are still the only app that offers fully-smart interactivity and have a strong appeal towards Design.
ReplyDelete