Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Adobe, Commercial, Freeware, Design Tips
Create user interface mockups quickly with Balsamiq Mockups
by Jason Clarke Mar 28th 2009 at 10:00AM
Do you ever have to design or have input into software user interfaces? If not, you might want to skip this post, but if so, Balsamiq Mockups might be of interest to you. The concept of the program is quite simple: create a bare-bones version of the user interface in question. So bare bones, in fact, that it almost looks like it was sketched.
The hand-drawn style might seem a little funny at first, but it serves a couple of very real purposes. Firstly, it makes it extremely clear that what you create with it is nothing but a mockup; nobody you show it to is actually going to expect that it be able to do anything. Second, it strips away all of the more subjective elements of design like color and shading, so you can focus on the usability of the layout of your user interface.
Balsamiq Mockups is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux, but unfortunately that flexibility comes with a price, in more ways than one. The first price is that it's a Flash application, so to run it on your machine as a desktop app requires Adobe Air. The second price is, well, the price: $79 US to be exact. Well, that's not entirely true. Yes, it is $79US for the full desktop version, but if you're not worried about being able to save your mockups or export them as PNG files, you can install a feature-limited desktop version for free.
[via John Watson]
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They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
tormahiri77 said 8:19AM on 3-29-2009
thank you
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ryzza007 said 7:38PM on 3-29-2009
"can't save as .png"
Anything to stop someone from pressing PrntScrn and opening MSPaint?
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whiskey said 4:11AM on 3-31-2009
Or mabye, you know, creating them for real using paper and pencil... Or going extremely tech on it (and maybe greener) by just scanning your own drawings once and either save each part as a gimp brush or creating vectors using inkscape.
Even easier? Take a screenshot of every feature you like from the web for real, crop then save them and keep'em handy somewhere to remix later...
justproto.com said 4:40PM on 5-22-2009
Good summary even though there’s much more to say on balsamiq. I must say balsamiq is a really nice tool. We are a web development company (http://desmart.com) and we use prototyping on all projects we do for our clients.
We tried quite a few solutions (including axure RP, protoshare, balsamiq)
Still non of them had all we needed. We wanted online browser based app that’s:
simple, reliable, with fully implemented real time multiuser collaboration
so we decided to create our own solution. We used it with our clients and decided to release it to the world in January 2009
It would be SUPER cool if tried our tool and send us some feedback
You can try it for FREE (without credit card) AT
http://justproto.com
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chris said 8:56AM on 5-29-2009
Thanks for the piece.
Thought you might be interested in the latest version of our GUI design tool: GUI Design Studio (http://www.carettasoftware.com/press/release-2009-05.html). We've added lots of new features which professional application and web designers are finding really useful, particularly in an agile development environment. You can try it out on a 30 day free trial from the download page: http://www.carettasoftware.com/downloads.html
Thanks!
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