Rapid Website Prototyping Using Balsamiq

For rapid site development and webpage prototyping

, use this software from Balsamiq. It lets you quickly add wireframes using your keyboard, drag and drop interfaces for simplicity, allows you to re-use symbol libraries to create master templates, and is fully cross-platform!

Brendan says, Balsamiq rocks. The fact that Mockingbird almost works on the iPad is pretty nifty too. To the people who say "pen and paper" I don't really think they have any idea what they're talking about. To me this is precisely like saying "If you need to communicate with someone in another country just hop on a boat and go talk to them. Don't struggle with tools like a telephone or email." It's misinformation. I'm 99% sure someone making an assertion that pen and paper is better for mockups than the modern tools has never used Mockups or Mockingbird.

As a consultant I've been creating mockups for 15 years in various ways (all painful till Balsamiq arrived) and I'll give you specific examples of why pen and paper is far inferior.

*First and foremost: collaboration and sharing. I'll create a mockup of a screen for a user. If I'm using Balsamiq I send it to them or post it to a wiki page. I ALWAYS Miss some things, the user can then make notes directly on the mockup or drag and drop components around themselves. The pure ease of sharing electronically gets people involved. I work with people around the USA and the world.

*If you have a screen of any complexity and the user wants the navigation tree moved from the left to the right what are you going to do with pencil and paper? Spend 30 minutes redrawing the entire screen or spend 5 seconds selecting everything to slide left and make room?

*How do you share something drawn by hand to people in other offices? Scan it in, scale it down, email? By definition a mockup you draw on a wiki is shared the instant you click save.

Creating a mockup in photoshop, Visio, and HTML are all relatively hard. But Balsamiq and Mockingbird are a completely new breed of tool. There was nothing available like Balsamiq till it was released about two or three years ago. Balsamiq is to 'paper and pen' what the iPhone is to 'two cans attached by string'.

by: Wilson Chua

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