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:
Great post! Great mockup!
I LOVE BALSAMIQ!
The problem I have with most prototyping sofware (including Baslamiq, Visio, iPlotz) is you can’t add your own controls… (easily).
To solve that, I usually use the new MockupMagnets from GuiMags:
http://www.mockupmagnets.com
It’s a whiteboard tool, so you can draw what you want 😉