• May 27

Balsamiq Mockups makes wireframing fun

When it comes to arhitecture there are some tools out there but I was never happy with any of them.

Visio makes the mockups look ancient

Omnigraffle has came out of that business in their latest version (have no idea where they hidden the software UI library)

Axure doesn’t justify the price. The wireframes don’t end up looking far from Visio’s end result

Gliffy is buggy buggy

Now whenever I hear about a new tool I go ahead and try it. I want to see if I’m missing a better alternative to the Fireworks that gives me a hard time. Not because it’s hard to use but because it’s hard not to design when you’re in the process and you have so many tools under your hands

That’s how I came to Balsamiq Mock-ups. I played with the online version but it was hard to get a gut feeling for it. I couldn’t really play with the interfaces I wanted to design since I couldn’t save it afterwards. But it looked like fun

So I decided to buy it. But lucky me I could get it for free if I would write about it on my blog :)

So I tried it on my latest mock-up.  A product page in an e-commerce site

(You can tell, by the looks of it, that it was fun creating it)

So here are the pros and the cons:

PROS:

1. HAPPY: The product icon, all the great shapes make the work much more enjoyable

2.Doesn’t take too much ram, just the same amount as the father firefox (I  switched to Chrome because of that but that’s another story)

3.Love the double text button for the speaking navigation

4. Cool linking feature for navigation elements

5. Neat presentation feature. Too bad can’t use it with clients unless I do screensharing. It can not be published like a intaractive entity - at least from what I know of

CONS:

1. FEAR : at the beginning I was afraid i don’t have enough editing space. Luckily it expands when you drag the elements in the lower area. That i was to find out later. Searched for a page setup option for about 10 minutes
2. DEAD TIMES (like in Photoshop): when you work with larger mock-ups, you want to work with more than one in paralel, save the existing mock-up the program becomes unresponsive for a while. God I hate that but the same thing happens with Adobe products. Why can’t every image tool be more like Picasa?
3. Becomes crowded : don’t like that the graphic elements can crowd the space (can’t edit the coloring of the frames, nore the transparency of some of them).
My wish list:
  • Wish I could change color of shapes, it makes them less important than they are (or at least their transparency) e.g. curly braces. button shape
  • Want more icons! twitter, stumbleupon -had to use surrogates for my mockup



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Comments

  1. Cristian Pascu June 3rd

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    A prototyping tool for creating more interactive wireframes is FlairBuilder. It lets you define pixel perfect positioning and sizing and has a whole set of rich interactive components such as links, buttons, tabs, lists, trees, etc.

    There is also an online demo for you to checkout right away at http://www.flairbuilder.com/demo/

    Let me know what do you think about it!

    Cheers,
    Cristian


  2. Efraim August 13th

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    I love Balsamiq mockups! Use it almost weekly!
    However, software UI tools don’t seem to solve the ‘first ideas’ or ‘napkin drawings’. For some reason, I can’t bring in software until the idea is a little more clear, since all UI software (incl. Balsamiq) only allow pre-set controls.

    To solve the early stages, I use:
    http://www.MockupMagnets.com
    Very fun magnetic UI widgets for prototyping on a whiteboard. You should try them!


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alinutza

Passionate about UX design