Effortlessly Showcase Your Mockups to Clients With QwikVu

If you’re a front end designer, presenting clients with mockups can be tricky. Emailing files can be cumbersome and lead to unwanted questions about how to view the image properly, and many image sharing services aren’t ideal for viewing full-size website mockups in their proper context.

Today we’re going to take a look at QwikVu, a web app that’s specifically built for designers who want to share web design mockups with clients. Is it the tool you’ve been looking for to make client presentations easier? Read on to find out.

Meet QwikVu

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The QwikVu homepage above sums up the service in a nutshell. Here you can sign up to try the service free for 30 days. This is a great way to kick the tires and test it out with a few clients to gauge its effectiveness.

Sign up for the service is quick and painless, you just need a name, email address and password and you’re up and running. Let’s take a look at what happens after you’ve signed up for an account and log on for the first time.

We’ll be going through the Pro plan today but there’s also a basic free service that allows you to upload and share individual images. Obviously, some of the more advanced features such as checking in to see if a client has viewed the mockup are reserved for the Pro service.

Setting Up a Gallery

When you sign into QwikVu, you’re greeted with a simple dashboard. Here you can view your client list, adjust your account information and access your galleries. I haven’t set any galleries up yet so there’s a brief message inviting me to do so.

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Like pretty much everything in QwikVu, setting up a new gallery is a really simple task that will only take you a few seconds. There’s a lovely form that walks you through the process, asking for basic information like your client details and the title of the gallery.

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As you can see, there are some really great advanced features here as well. You can choose a custom URL for the gallery, password protect it, assign a custom background color and choose how the images are aligned in the browser window.

Adding Images

Once you’ve set up a gallery, it’s time to add in some images. You can toss them in one at a time or grab them all in one upload. Once you’re finished uploading, the screen below allows you to rearrange, preview and edit each image.

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Sharing a Gallery With a Client

Once you’re ready to share a gallery, click the “Finished” button in the screen above to go back to the gallery view. Here you’ll see a list of all of the galleries that you’ve created. On the right side of this list, there’s a strip of buttons and information. You can check to see if the client has viewed the gallery, see it for yourself, edit the images, etc.

The button we’re looking for right now is the “share” command, represented by a little envelope icon.

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Clicking this image will bring up what is essentially an email window. Most of the contents is filled in for you automatically but you can customize all of it to your liking.

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Once you’re finished, click the “Share” button and the email will be sent off to your client. Your work is done, now all you have to do is wait for the feedback!

Client Reviews

Once you’ve sent out the invite, the client will receive a simple, text-only email that contains your custom message along with a link to view the gallery. You don’t have to worry about whether or not they know how to properly view the file, it’s a fool-proof process where a single click gets them what they want to see.

The invite link opens up the gallery in a browser. Your settings before have defined the display behavior here. For instance, my image is shown centered on a pure white background. It looks and feels just like a website: I can scroll up and down and the image stays centered as I resize my browser window. You can see my example gallery here.

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To make sure there’s no confusion with your clients, there’s a little information box that pops up when you click on the image that informs you about the nature of the mockup. You are told that the image merely represents a design so the buttons and links will not function.

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The bar that you see at the bottom allows you to scroll through the images in the gallery, share it with someone else, and download the files.

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You can also view the images in a thumbnail strip for easy navigation. Just click the little grid on the left side of the toolbar and you’ll get something like the window below.

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Viewing On The Go

Odds are your client is going to receive that email and want to check it right away. If he/she is out of the office and on a mobile device, the viewing experience is optimized and shown in an online image viewer with a quick message to explain that it’s a non-functioning mockup.

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The above image shows what the gallery looks like on my iPad. You can swipe back and forth between the pictures or view an automatic slideshow.

Worth a Look?

When the good folks at QwikVu asked us to take a look at their service, we were happy to oblige. It’s a great app that serves a clear purpose and works like a dream. The interface is quite attractive, the UX flow is so simple that anyone can manage it and everything works exactly as advertised.

QwikVu really is a great way to show off your flat mockups to clients. I love having the ability to display work centered in the browser at full size, just like I want it to be. Your clients will definitely appreciate the privacy side, password protected mockups are sure to give them a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that their secrets are safe from prying eyes.

Pricing

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QwikVu is $9.99 per month or $99 for a year. To be honest, this is where things get a bit rocky for me. It’s a great app, but a hundred bucks a year for what amounts to slightly modified image hosting is going to be hard for a lot of web designers to justify, especially when they likely already have personal web hosting where they can upload their images.

Fortunately, there is a free component so if you do in fact get some great functionality for nothing. However, I would recommend augmenting the $9.99 plan with some awesome additional features such as the ability to define portions of the uploaded images as clickable links to make the mockups functioning wireframes.

Further, I think with a system like this you simply have to have means for client feedback (another great option that could be only on the premium plan). When a client views a mockup, it would be great if there were some sort of sticky notes feature that allowed for specific portions of the mockup to be targeted and discussed. I know the point here is to keep it simple and fight feature bloat, but simple and direct change requests could be implemented without adding too much complexity. There’s even an example page that unintentionally showcases how this system might look!

Conclusion

If you’re currently on the lookout for a better way to show off your non-functioning mockups to clients, QwikVu is a great solution. The result is far better than emailing a JPG, you really feel like you’re looking at the beginnings of a website in your browser. I highly recommend that you stop by the site and give the free trial a test run.

Have you tried QwikVu or any other service? Let us know your thoughts in the comment area below.