Online proofing allows for real-time collaboration, streamlined feedback, and a centralized review process. But while you’re coping with quite a lot of digital assets, things can get complicated and frustrating.
Imagine having to review multiple digital assets – from website designs to web copy, to social media graphics to video content, amongst others. Each asset requires a special tool for creation and one other for proofing. The result? A jumbled mess of feedback scattered across various platforms. It’s like trying to piece together a puzzle without having all of the pieces in a single place.
This is where streamlining your online proofing process comes into play.
By optimizing your proofing process, you possibly can ensure a smoother review phase, quicker approval times, and ultimately, higher quality digital assets.
What Is Online Proofing?
Online proofing is a contemporary, digital approach to reviewing and approving work in progress for your web projects. It’s a collaborative process that enables teams and agencies to share, review, and approve documents, designs, website mockups, zip files, and multimedia content in an internet environment. This process can be referred to as creative proofing.
When done right, online proofing streamlines the review process, reduces the danger of errors, and accelerates project delivery. It also fosters higher collaboration by allowing team members to provide real-time feedback, irrespective of where they’re situated.
Comparatively, traditional proofing methods often involve physical documents, time-consuming meetings, and lengthy email threads. These can lead to miscommunications, delays, and missed errors.
5 Steps to Streamline Your Online Proofing Process
Consider these steps best practices to consider.
1. Choose the Right Online Proofing Tool
If you’re working on an internet site or design project, chances are high you’d be working with various kinds of digital assets. So it’s very necessary to select a tool that caters to all of the needs of those assets. Or at the very least, one which integrates 90% of your tools to centralize the review and approval process. Otherwise, you’ll end up moving between online proofing tools – and you realize how tiring that may get.
When selecting an internet proofing tool for your agency, make sure that the tool has the next:
- Supports multiple file types like live URLs, images, videos, PDFs, zip files, and HTML, amongst others.
- Annotation tools to make it easier for reviewers to provide clear, specific feedback. E.g. text boxes, arrows, highlights, screen recording, screen share, and other visual feedback tools.
- Version control to track changes, revert to previous versions, and compare versions side-by-side.
- Feedback management features like threaded discussions, organized comments, and a central repository for feedback. This will help keep the review process organized and efficient.
- Integrations with project management software, design software, communication tools, and Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems to streamline workflows.
- Security and Compliance features to ensure your data is secure. These features might be in the shape of information encryption, access control, and audit trails.
- Task management features to organize and track tasks in several views like Kanban and Table, prioritize and triage issues, and ensure everyone seems to be on the identical page.
- Automated Reporting to allow project managers and management to have an summary of the progress of projects within the organization – in real time.
Some popular online proofing tools include Marker.io, Hive, zipBoard, and Filestage.
2. Establish Clear Guidelines and Roles
You wouldn’t want to start collaborating on a project where team members, clients and other stakeholders aren’t sure what they’re expected to do. That’s why defining roles and guidelines is significant through the feedback and QA process. It will help remove doubts and keep your online proofing process efficient, effective, and well-organized.
Here are 4 key things to consider on this step:
- Clearly define who the reviewers, approvers, and moderators are. Reviewers provide feedback, approvers make the ultimate decision, and moderators manage the method.
- Provide specific examples of how your stakeholders should give feedback.
- Set clear timeframes for each review stage. This helps keep the project on course and ensures that everybody knows when their input is required.
- Establish channels you’ll use for communication and collaboration and set expectations for response times. For providing visual feedback, you should use an intuitive tool like zipBoard. And for communication purposes, Slack (for async) and Microsoft Teams or Zoom for team meetings.
3. Set Up an Online Proofing Process
You can have a wonderful online proofing tool and well-informed stakeholders ready to review digital assets and log off on them. However, with out a documented proofing process in place, you’ll waste time determining what needs to be done.
It’s one thing to tell stakeholders what they need to do, and it’s one other thing to have a system that drives their actions. That’s why you wish to arrange a review and approval process. Good thing should you use an internet proofing tool like zipBoard that enables you to create a customized workflow within the platform. Your process can seem like what’s within the flowchart below:
4. Tailor the Proofing Process for Each Asset
Each digital asset has unique characteristics that require a tailored approach to proofing. For instance, videos would require using timestamps and documents would require highlights – when providing feedback. Hence, it’s necessary to communicate the unique needs to your stakeholders and allow them to know what’s expected of them for each asset.
Additionally, using an internet proofing tool that supports reviewing all of the varieties of digital assets you create will help centralize the method and reduce juggling multiple tools which wastes time.
Did you realize design agencies who use zipBoard for online proofing and stakeholder collaboration have their employees saving 2hrs per worker per day?
Learn more here.
5. Measure and Improve Your Process
To ensure your online proofing process is as efficient and effective as possible, it’s necessary to measure your performance for current and past projects and make improvements based on the available data.
Here’s an easy process to track performance:
- Identify key metrics to track: Determine what metrics are most vital for your team. This could include turnaround times (how long it takes from when a digital asset is submitted for review to when it’s approved), feedback quality (how helpful and actionable the feedback is), and resolution rates (how quickly feedback is addressed and resolved).
- Gather feedback: Use surveys, user interviews, and internal data evaluation to gather feedback in your proofing process. This could involve asking team members about their experiences with the method, examining data on how the method is getting used, and looking for patterns or areas of concern.
- Continuous Improvement: Based on the info and feedback you gather, make improvements to your process. This could involve adjusting your guidelines, providing additional training to team members, and even switching to a special online proofing tool if vital. Remember, the goal is to make the method as smooth and efficient as possible for everyone involved.
Happy proofing!
6 Benefits of Streamlining Your Online Proofing Process
Streamlining your online proofing process…
- Reduces human effort and eliminates the tedious task of sharing files or documents as attachments in emails for approval.
- Improves status tracking and enables you to get real-time updates on the progress of tasks.
- Enhances clarity and visibility and ensures everyone involved within the project has a transparent understanding of the tasks at hand.
- Ensures version control, reduces misunderstandings, and allows stakeholders to stay updated on various versions of the digital assets under review.
- Helps your team stay organized and increases your probabilities of completing projects faster – since juggling between tools might be significantly minimized.
- Reduces the time stakeholders spend reviewing and approving digital assets.
5 Common Challenges Design Agencies Face and Solutions to Implement
Implementing a streamlined online proofing process comes with its challenges – especially should you’re transitioning from a standard proofing process.
1. Lack of Stakeholder Buy-in
Your team members, management, and other relevant stakeholders won’t routinely buy into your idea or suggestion of an internet proofing process. You must tell them why this latest way is the very best and the way it impacts all stakeholders – positively.
Solution: Highlight the Return on Investment (ROI) of streamlined online proofing. Find case studies and other relevant data to show how it could actually lead to faster project turnaround times, improved quality of digital assets, and increased team productivity, in addition to satisfied clients.
2. Inconsistent Feedback
This happens when there aren’t any “rules” in place to guide the proofing process. Sometimes, your clients and other reviewers could also be latest to giving feedback on web projects. So you wish to guide the method.
This could be very necessary because inconsistent or unclear feedback can decelerate the proofing process.
Solution: Provide them with a checklist or anything to allow them to know what they need to review and how they need to do it. You may organize training on how to give effective feedback or just record a video showing them how to do it – so that they can watch at their convenience.
3. Difficulty in Adapting to New Technology
Adopting latest technology could be daunting for some stakeholders – especially those that aren’t tech-savvy. However, change is required. So what do you do?
Solution: Choose user-friendly tools – like zipBoard – that supply intuitive interfaces and comprehensive support resources. Additionally, provide training resources and be patient as team members adapt to the brand new tool. More so, based on the feedback tool you’re using, you possibly can request for personalized demos for your team.
4. Overcoming Silos
In some organizations, different teams or departments can have their very own ways of doing things – leading to siloed processes. And breaking down these silos and getting everyone on board with a unified proofing process could be a challenge.
Solution: Get a collaboration and feedback platform that caters to the necessity of each team, or at the very least one which integrates the respective design/creation tools of every team into one. Adapting to this step could be difficult so you possibly can refer to point 3.
5. Balancing Speed and Quality
In the push to deliver and launch projects, the standard of feedback and review can sometimes take a backseat. It’s quite difficult striking the correct balance between speed and quality. But there’s a way out.
Solution: Set realistic timelines, prioritize tasks, and using a proofing tool that enables for efficient feedback can assist maintain this balance.
Examples of Online Proofing Tools
Filestage: Simplifies proofing for ad campaigns, video production, and landing page design by facilitating sharing, commenting, and approval.
Aproove: A cloud-based tool for comparing, editing, and approving creatives and artworks before printing or publication.
Adobe Workfront: Seamlessly integrates with Adobe Creative Cloud, providing a proofing experience for designs and graphics.
ReviewStudio: Supports reviewing images, videos, PDFs, and web content with annotation features.
PageProof: Enables reviewing and approving designs, documents, and marketing materials.
Ziflow: Versatile proofing solution for various assets, including images, videos, PDFs, and web pages.
Hive: A project management software that integrates proofing and approvals, allowing teams to review files like designs and marketing materials.
ProofHub: Combines project management with proofing and approvals.
Marker.io: Annotates web pages and sends feedback directly to project management tools.
zipBoard: Centralizes the web proofing process for live URLs (web sites and web apps), videos, images, zip files, PDF documents, audio files, and more. zipBoard also enables stakeholder collaboration between internal and external stakeholders in a single place – and bridges the technical gap
Review All Your Digital Assets in One Place with zipBoard
By now, you will have seen that should you truly want to streamline your online proofing process, you don’t only need an internet proofing tool.
You need a proofing tool with a central hub that brings all stakeholders and digital assets together in a single place. zipBoard is that software – and you possibly can try it for free.
See what Beth Epperson, QA Manager & Accessibility SME, ELM – a design agency had to say about using zipBoard for their review and approval process:
Implementing zipBoard into our development process has taken the team from using antiquated manual processes to a straightforward to use, globally accessible, online process. zipBoard’s environment allows multiple projects to be arrange and managed uniquely; where other tools force a particular method for the whole lot, zipBoard gives you and your team some elbow room. The client and the interior team can each access the info while still preserving the integrity and security of internal information.
Want to deliver projects 50% faster and save 5000+ hours annually on online proofing?
Try zipBoard for free today!
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