Review of Balsamiq Mockups
Posted on Jan 14, 2009
I recently received a copy of Balsamiq Mockups for the desktop and I have to say that thoroughly impressed. Mockups for the desktop is an Adobe AIR application. In the past, I have found creating storyboards or mockups of an application to be a tedious and problematic process. Oftentimes, the people in charge of creating mockups
used tools that were never intended for the purpose or ones that were
but weren't very good at the job. Other times, the end result was a
scribbled and unintelligible mess - and
that was when I actually bothered withmockups since I hated doing them. However, Balsamiq Mockups may change my opinion.
I recently tried Mockups
for creating a storyboard for a fairly simple AIR application my wife
is having created for her ongoing educational research projects. The
application consists, at the moment, of only six screens. While this is
a small application, a storyboard was going to be absolutely critical
to convey the intent of the application screens and the desired
functionality.
One of the keys here is that Mockups helps us
bridge the communication gap between someone like my wife, who is not a
programmer, and myself, who is. It does this by providing a
comprehensive set of predefinedUI elements that you can drag and drop
onto a page. Thus, I could spend a little bit of time with "the client"
and easily drop in the required application elements on a page in a way
that the client understands but that also relates directly to an actual
application element. You can see some examples of this in the images
below.
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Another element that Balsamiq Mockups simplifies is adding notes to your mockup
screen. There are a number of predefined markup items you can drop on
the page, some of which you can see above. This makes it easy toconvery additional intent or clarifications without needlessly cluttering up the layout.
One thing that wasn't completely clear to me is that it appears that each screen is intended to be its own independent mockup. You can clone an existing mockup so as not to repeat work that may be duplicated and the program does a nice job of allowing you to manage a number of opened mockups at one time. Once you have completed the mockups, the AIR application allows you to easily export them all to individual PNG images to import into a presentation or do whatever you like. If you have multiple mockups open, you can export them all at one time.
I found the UI of Balsamiq Mockups
to be pretty intuitive as well. Basically you just have elements
organized at the top of your page that you can drop anywhere on your
document. You can view thumbnails of all the elements or you can view
specific categories. The only issue I had sometimes was finding the
specific element I was looking for in a particular category, but that
was generally easily solved by browsing all. Once you drop an item onto
the page, when it is selected a dialog will appear with a number of
layout options allowing you to properly size and align items. Many
times this dialog isn't even required as the program will offer guides
on the page to help you align and place items, though these sometimes
don't show until after you drop the item onto the page and then
reselect it to move it.
In the end I am extremely impressed with this program and will probably use it whenever I am in need of doing some UI and functionality planning. I also think the current price of $79
for the desktop version is very reasonable considering the quality of
the application. Nonetheless, if you are an open source developer or
general do-gooder, they will consider offering a free license for these purposes.
Comments
Actually works really well...
Posted By ryan / Posted on 01/14/2009 at 1:53 PM
If you haven't already registered, they should give you a free license, as you've posted on your blog about it and it's lead to at least one sale less than a day later.
all the best
</cliff>
Posted By Cliff Pearson / Posted on 01/15/2009 at 1:17 AM
Posted By mark vernon / Posted on 01/15/2009 at 7:04 PM
The drawings have been perfect for early user testing, because the customers can see we are still in the early phase of design, and are eager to contribute.
Disclosure: I received a free license, but I get to test allot of prototyping tools- and this is the first one I have been really, really impressed with.
Posted By Theresa Neil / Posted on 01/25/2009 at 4:10 PM
Thought you might be interested in the latest version of our GUI design tool: GUI Design Studio (http://www.carettasoftware.com/press/release-2009-05.html). We've added lots of new features which professional application and web designers are finding really useful, particularly in an agile development environment. You can try it out on a 30 day free trial from the download page: http://www.carettasoftware.com/downloads.html
Thanks!
Posted By Chris / Posted on 05/29/2009 at 7:59 AM
Still neither balsamiq nor other tools really fitted us for a number of reasons.
As web development company using prototyping on daily basis we created our own tool.
We wanted something
simple,
easy to use,
fast and reliable
with real time multiuser collaboration
You can check if we kept that promise at http://justproto.com
Your feedback will be highly appreciated.
Posted By Peter / Posted on 06/02/2009 at 9:45 AM
Posted By ReadGadget / Posted on 09/06/2009 at 10:22 AM