Good Stuff: Balsamiq Mockups
November 6th, 2008 | Published in good stuff, personal
Not everyone has photoshop skills (one look at my website shows that I don’t–allow I plan to change the site layout and design soon!) and typically when I wireframe workflows I use a pen and a blank piece of paper. It will have little lines and squares, and scribbles and it hardly looks like a webpage. I recently cam across this cool tool called Balsamiq. It makes it so easy to drag and drop UI elements and construct a mockup.
Here is an example of a mockup I made for an operations dashboard–this literally took me under a minute.
It is written in flex and you can save your images, if you do a lot of mockups you can also buy a version for $79 (which is pretty good considering the time this can save). It was easy to learn and very intuitive. I wish it had even more UI elements and the elements were more flexible (like being able to add buttons in a table)–but it is still really cool.
If you ever design web sites, or need to communicate requirements this is a great tool for quickly putting together wireframes. Check it out at: Balsamiq Mockups.
