What’s the best software for critiquing webpages?

Do you use collaborative feedback software? In this article, we’ll explain why we believe you’d benefit from it. We’ll also tell you everything we know about the available software platforms.

Every week, our consultants meet to discuss the work they’ve created for clients. The process is fascinating. One consultant presents their work—a wireframe, a design, or maybe the client’s existing control—and the other consultants give suggestions as to how it could be improved. This allows us to draw upon the wide-ranging experience of our team.

We use collaborative feedback software to keep track of the suggestions made. Here’s how it works:

• The consultant uploads their image into the software. (It’s all web hosted, so it’s really simple to do.)
• The consultant chooses whom they’d like to invite to comment on the image.
• Those invited annotate the image with their suggestions and comments.

Collaborative feedback software (in this case Notable) lets you gather feedback from your team, your clients, and anyone else. With Notable, users leave feedback by dragging an orange rectangle around the area concerned, then typing their comment. Comments can be viewed by hovering over the rectangles.

The software allows us to easily collect all of the feedback in one place. We find it to be more effective than verbal feedback because it encourages everyone to leave concrete, specific suggestions.

In the early stages of a design, you may prefer the users to be from within your own team. However, you may also choose to use the software when presenting designs to clients or senior management.

Here’s what we were looking for

When we were shopping for suitable software, we found loads of lists of contenders (thanks to Tripwire Magazine, Six Revisions, Vandelay Design and several others). Rather than giving you detailed, impartial reviews, we’re just going to tell you what we settled on and why, in the hope that it will help to save you from hours of trudging through sign-up processes.

What we wanted

• The ability to upload large (often very long) images. Many of the apps failed to handle the unusually large files that we often create. We tested them using a screen-capture image of a long page of dimensions 1,905 by 14,704 pixels, which had a file size of 8.5 MB. Some of the software apps made the image blurry, some took ages to load and scroll them, and some of them crashed or stalled.
• The ability to keep everything private within a defined group of people.
• Pleasant to use.
• Works in Chrome and Firefox, so we don’t have to remember to switch browser.
• A way of allowing all of the consultants to view everyone’s feedback, preferably in real-time without having to reload a page.
• A way of being able to discuss each comment.
• A way of being able to “check off” each comment once it has been completed—so it becomes like a task list.

Some nice features that you may want, but we didn’t

• The ability to get feedback from an open community.
• The ability to create defined tests for users (Usabilla and Chalkmark do this—see below for details).

Here’s the list of software we considered

Just a few of the software tools we evaluated.

The following list describes the software tools we considered. Scroll down to the next section if you’re only interested in seeing which ones we chose in the end. Also, note that these aren’t supposed to be detailed software reviews—they’re just our initial impressions as to whether each software solution would be suitable for our specific needs.

Backboard. Backboard has recently been acquired by box.net, and someone mentioned to us that it isn’t being supported any more. It looked promising at first, but we gave up after failing to work out how to sign up for a paid account, and customer service didn’t reply to our email.

CritiqueTheSite. Wasn’t what we were looking for; it allows users to leave comments next to a site, a bit like Google Sidewiki.

ConceptFeedback. Doesn’t allow sharing with a closed community. Everything has to be made public.

Chalkmark. Chalkmark is for moderated tests, and it does them well. We wondered whether we could use it for our needs, but it only allows testers to click once on the page, then it moves to the next question.

ProofHQ. Looked like it would do the job. However, we found the interface to be too complex for our needs (maybe because it has some sophisticated permissions settings and workflow functionality).

Onotate—Looked very good, but it gave a weird error (a file appeared to have been uploaded twice, then when we deleted one of the copies, it deleted both of them). Also, we failed to share the file with each other, so we moved on.

BounceApp. Bounce was created by the same people who created Notable. You might consider it to be “Notable Lite”. With Bounce, everything’s public, which is why it wasn’t suitable for our needs. There’s a good comparison of the differences between Notable and Bounce in this article.

Usabilla. Usabilla has some really promising features, but it failed to upload our large image.

Twiddla. Twiddla is a real-time virtual whiteboard. You can upload images and watch people adding comments in real-time. Unfortunately, it was unable to handle our large image, reducing it to a blurry thumbnail.

Vyew. Vyew is another virtual whiteboard software, and we had the same problems with it that we had with Twiddla.

Scribblar. Scribblar is whiteboard software. It failed to upload our image, giving an error message: “Error. Upload failed.”

FineTuna. Pros: It has a clever name, a cute cat, and looked promising. Cons: It can’t upload images larger than 2,800 by 2,800 pixels, so we never got to see it in action.

Stixy. Stixy’s maximum file size is 4 MB.

IDidWork. We struggled to sign up. Pages weren’t displaying properly.

RedMark. Our large image uploaded fine. It worked, but it ran a bit slowly, presumably due to the image size. The image became a bit cluttered with call-out lines once we’d added about ten comments. Also, there’s no easy way of scrolling down the image besides dragging it.

Cozimo. Cozimo managed to upload the image, but struggled to display it. At certain zoom levels, parts of the image weren’t displayed.

Here’s the software we settled on

Unfortunately, we didn’t find one tool that had all the features we were looking for. Here were the two tools that we found most useful.

(By the way, none of the links on this page are affiliate links. We’re vendor neutral, and we don’t profit from recommending technology.)

1. Notable

So far, we haven’t been able to find anything that beats Notable. (That’s why we chose to use it for the image near the top of this page.) Notable doesn’t allow you to actually draw or write on the image—it just lets you attach comments to those orange rectangles. Also, we were hoping to find software that would allow us to see comments being added in real-time without having to refresh the page, and that’s not possible with Notable either. However, for us, the fact that it runs really fast with no glitches more than makes up for that.

2. ConceptShare

ConceptShare has all the features of Notable and many more, but it feels a bit slower, and we find it less intuitive. Its customer support is very good.

One of its packages is purpose-made for critiquing video. Video is really hard to critique remotely, so if you know someone who works with video, they might find this feature invaluable.

We’d love to hear your views

Are you having success with collaborative feedback software? Do you know of any better software we should be considering? Do you think we’ve wrongly dismissed one of the software tools we evaluated? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments at the bottom of this page.

Would you like to learn more about conversion?

If you’d like to learn more about how to grow your business, you should see this list of useful tools for identifying why your visitors aren’t converting. You should also read the following case studies, which show our process in action:

• How we made an extra £14 million a year for a travel company
• How we made $1 million for SEOmoz—with one landing page and a few emails
• How we doubled the sales of a web app
• How we increased the conversion rate of Voices.com by over 400%

These how-to guides will come in useful too.

Would you like to outsource or delegate your conversion activities?

If you’d rather find out right away how we might help your company to increase its conversion rate and profits, just get in touch with us for a friendly chat with one of our consultants, during which we’ll identify the biggest opportunities for you to grow your business using conversion rate optimization.

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