I’ve been spending a fair amount of time over the past couple weeks designing UIs in Balsamiq Mockup and am enjoying it. Gadgetopia has a decent review that I mostly agree with. To summarize: it’s super simple, easy to use, and provides a lot of common interface elements.
The part I disagreed with:
The only drawback of Balsamiq Mockups is that you run the risk of getting a little cutesy. Everything in it is of this “sketch” style, which might get old after a while.
This is actually something I particularly like about Balsamiq – the “handwritten” informal look of the lines & letters says something about the fidelity of the mockup. I remember reading a UX blog post that resonated with me (can’t find it now, will keep looking) which recommended using overlapping lines for edges to indicate that the screen shouldn’t be taken as a final design but something needing input and refinement. The hand drawn buttons / text / edges in Balsmiq convey this pretty nicely.
I completely agree. We’ve been using Balsamiq for six months or so now, and it has revolutionized how we produce functional specifications. I also love the sketched look of the prototypes for all the reasons you suggest. When we worked together at Lycos we used to find that mockups could be too realistic and that all the time would be spent discussing the color scheme, the chosen font etc. It is important to be able to focus on the information architecture and to ignore the polishing details until much later.
– Andy
I’ll have to check this out. I was at Mix this year and Microsoft announced ‘Sketchflow’ it also looks to have a bunch of potential. But it’s not out yet. They also have custm fonts that are modeled after bill bruxtons hand writting. I wonders why they did this until I read your blog.
I caught the demo of Sketchflow but haven’t tried it out yet. Looks promising. It’s on the list of things to do, hopefully I’ll get to it soon.