Comments on: Wireframing with Balsamiq Mockups

By: rainwebs

rainwebs — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 01:34:54 +0000

I really love how Balsamiq is presenting designs. For those who also like it there’s Mock4U, that allows to do some agile UML with it now:

http://blog.rainer.eschen.name/mock4u/

By: AJK

AJK — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:36:16 +0000

I am currently trying out iPlotz. I am a big fan of Balsamiq because of the community and quick response from the creator, Peldi. He is very quick and open to add new mockup items to his program. I really love that.

So far I like the fact that iPlotz have interaction, but I dislike the fact that I have to save a page before I can edit another.

By: Jonathan Attias

Jonathan Attias — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:28:25 +0000

There are a lot of pros and cons to using “sketchy” mockups and a lot depends on who you’re showing your designs to and what their understanding and expectations of them are.

As a designer, you might prefer to work in a more sketchy design environment or you might prefer the high-fidelity precision of the final work. Whether you’re working on initial concepts or detailed prototyping can also be a factor.

Our GUI Design Studio wireframing and prototyping tool supports common Windows skins (NT, XP and Vista) and also a sketchy outline style and you can switch between them at any time. We’ll be adding a real “Sketch” style at some point.

We’ve also had a lot of customers successfully creating SAP, mobile and other non-standard interfaces with GUI Design Studio. Web interfaces tend to be a real mixture where almost anything goes.

Anyway, I wrote a blog post about ‘high’ versus ‘low’ fidelity prototyping (about 2 years ago now) if you’re interested in a further take on this:

http://gui-design-prototyping.com/gui-design-studio/low-fidelity-or-high-fidelity-prototypes-for-software/

~Jonathan

By: mark vernon

mark vernon — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 16:55:43 +0000

We’ve just launched a competitor to Balsamiq, at http://iplotz.com – let us know what you think…

By: Tyler K

Tyler K — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:05:43 +0000

Hey, thats a sweet tool. I’ve worked on one project using http://www.jumpchart.com/

It’s very basic for formatting general sections of the site, but its nice because it easily exports what essentially is a view directory for once you actually have to make it work.

Anyway, not nearly as comprehensive, but good for design folks to get an idea when they’re figuring out what content goes where.

By: Nate Koechley

Nate Koechley — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:37:45 +0000

Hey David, thanks for the comment!

I recognize and share Balsamiq’s belief that using intentionally rough and casual “sketchy” elements allows collaborators, stakeholders, and users to focus on the features and flow rather than on their fondness or distaste for a particular visual design. That said, I think their visualization of elements is still too polarizing. I hope they make it possible to customize them in the future.

Further, there are some organizations wherein the visual language is fixed and consistent. If one is doing design work within an immutable environment, than this disconnect presents undue friction between the tool and the end result.

I think the tool may still be very useful for many uses and users. But this lack of customization — which seems technically very trivial to offer — definitely reduces the viability of the tool for many.

By: David Stamm

David Stamm — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:15:10 +0000

I emailed the Balsamiq developers about reskinning – the designers in my shop were very turned off my the default look & feel. I got a very polite response indicating that they were not even considering adding the ability to skin wireframes.

I’d be delighted to hear if the situation had changed. This is a potentially very useful tool.