Giving and receiving design feedback can be difficult, as bulleted lists of comments and screenshots are often labor intensive and miss the context of the complete design. To make this easier, Bay Area interaction design and design strategy firm ZURB just releasedBounce, a free and easy to use tool that can capture screenshots of any site and then allows you to annotate these images. You can also upload your own images and annotate them in the tool’s web interface.
Using the application could hardly be easier. You simply ask Bounce to grab a screenshot of the site you want to annotate (or you upload a screenshot yourself), and then you can annotate this screenshot with callouts and comments. After you finish writing your comments, you can share the URL with your colleagues and post your annotations to Twitter and Facebook.
While ZURB is mainly targeting designers who want to send annotations back and forth, the tool is also flexible enough to accommodate any other kind of annotation, be it a comment on a family picture or a recipe you found online.
The ZURB team tried to keep things as simple as possible, which makes the application extremely easy to use. Bounce doesn’t offer quite as many features as screen capturing tools like Skitch or Jing, but then the purpose of the app is also slightly different and for most purposes, Bounce’s text annotations and callouts work perfectly fine. The only feature we really missed was the ability to comment on somebody else’s annotations. While multiple users can annotate the same screenshot, it would be nice if you could use the tool to discuss these annotations as well.
For more information about Bounce and ZURB’s development process, also have a look at the company’s announcement here.
Need More Features? Try Notable
At its core, Bounce is a slimmed down version Notable, ZURB’s flagship application (our review), which offers more collaboration and privacy features, as well as the ability to archive and organize past feedback and give feedback on code, SEO and copy. ZURB also offers a free plan for Notable. For a good example of how ZURB uses Notable in its own work, have a look at the company’s review of our iPhone application.
