design reviews: best way to use jira/confluence

howard tiersky October 31, 2011

Our company is a creative agency and we have screen designs for web and mobile applications that go through many rounds of design reviews. Typically a set of screens is reviewed and many comments made and then teh design team goes and iterates the screens (in Photoshop for example) and then they are re-reviewed. SOme reviews are internal and some are with clients.

Our current process involves using PDFs of teh screens which we then use the comment feature in acrobat to annotate with chagnes. We then email these pdfs around. Its kind of clunly and we want to do it "in the cloud" using some combination of Jira and/or confluence (we use both).

In a perfect world, the designer would post the screens into a single confluence page for example and then anyone could come along and add annotations with tehir comments to teh designs. In fact in an even more perfect world, you'd be able to page through each version of a screen, so you'd see version 1 (with or without annotatons), then you could page to version 2 that would show hwo the changes were made based on the previous annotations, and on and on through each of the versions.

I know confuence has versions, tho they are a bit clunky to get to, and that you can add comments to a confluence page (though not for individual graphcs on the page)...but also there doesnt seem to be a way to annote individual graphics with "flags" that relate to comments like in acrobat.

We have tried gliffy and balsamiq. One of them (forget which) has very poor support for bitmaps so thats never going to work. the other is just many many steps to add an annotation... and so its not fluid and intuitive... plus the commenting tools are kind of clunky (compared to acrobat).

Anyway we're looking for a better answer. It doesnt have to work exatly the way we are envisioning, we just want a better process. Ideas???

3 answers

1 vote
howard tiersky July 1, 2012

To anyone who finds this old question, we did a whole review of different options for this and then presented it at the recent Atlassian Summit in SF. If you'd like to see a video of the presentation, its avail here

http://summit.atlassian.com/archives/2012/jira-everywhere/enabling-design-reviews

0 votes
timneil December 12, 2012

I'm interested in whether Confluence can do this. Currently www.pixelapse.com is great for reviewing designs (versioning, anotations, PSD support etc.). But it would be nice to have intergration into Jira as we're already using it.

0 votes
JamieA
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
October 31, 2011

You might want to take a look at this confluence plugin: https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/37075

I have not used it, I don't know how well it works when annotating images for instance.

I like the idea of a number of layers that you can quickly flick through to see the evolution and the comments, but AFAIK there is nothing like this available for confluence atm.

howard tiersky October 31, 2011

we looked at this. the problem is that it doesnt annotate over an image. So if I have paragraphs of text in a confluence page then thats fine but I can t position one fo their notes over a specific spot in an embedded image... if it did that then it might do the trick, but it doesnt seem to

JamieA
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
October 31, 2011

There was a question about image annotations recently, I suggested a jquery plugin. I can't find it now and I'm afraid you can't search this site.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer