We’ve been using Balsamiq Mockups for some time at my day job, but until recently I hadn’t used the tool heavily on any of the projects I’d been working.  Today I needed to shell out an example search results page for a project I am architecting in SharePoint.

Think of Balsamiq Mockups as Visio for the layman – it’s light, easy to use, not cluttered with unnecessary functionality, and runs on Adobe Air.  The presentation is something akin to what you might mockup on a whiteboard in the office and the end result, although a signature of the Balsamiq development team, is crisp and ideal for any document deliverable.

What I like about the tool most is that I was able to complete a mockup, which is functional for discussion purposes and doubles for architecture documentation, and it took me a fraction of the time I’d have spent in Visio – this gave me time to write this blog post.

At a price of $79, the product is a steal for the time it’ll save you.

Check out my finished page mockup: