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Balsamiq - Wireframe prototyping that works

Monday, September 21, 2009

You’re a developer. Your marketing people need to put up a website for a project, but not all the elements are defined. In fact, they say “just build something, we’ll give you text later. Just make it look nice.”

Suddenly, your blood runs cold.

I’ve been a professional developer for years, first in the bad-old pre-bubble days to now. Worked for start-ups, governments, internet and brick-and-mortar, magazines online and off. Time is often used up early in the process - and often the final stage, development, has the tightest of schedules. Often the client or business developer has an idea of what they want, but not a clear view. You, the developer and programmer, think you have an open slate, but in reality you’re often one step away from a usability nightmare. How do you get the client to understand the needs of the visitor, the focus of the site, text vs. space, etc when they’re focusing only on colors. First things first - what did you really want to build?

Enter stage left - Balsamiq Mockups.

Think of it as a Mockup Engine - and a brilliant one at that. “Drag and Drop” components on the page, but the components are smart enough to scale accordingly without distorting. For example, drop a window component, with complete with control elements, on the layout and stretch it - the window grows but the controls stay rooted in place! Move it around, add features, drag more components down from the menu and, well, here - just look for yourself:

If you’re a professional, you’ve been down this road before, and so by this point you should have your checkbook out. I got giggly just looking at the vid.

Balsamiq Mockups runs on the Adobe Air framework, so there’s a version for all major platforms. There’s also a component for JIRA that allows every step of the development chain a chance to contribute to the process. That might scare many people, but Balsamiq Mockups creates not only image previews but also XML structures for inclusion in a JIRA ticket. Don’t agree with a revision, track it back and all the elements are still live and flexible. No more having to work from Photoshop comps. Yipee!  Plugins are also available for Confluence, XWiki and FogBugz, but I’m only familiar with JIRA. What I’ve seen of the integration, it looks slick.

There’s a growing user community actively adding to Balsamiq Mockups: a library exchange, conversion tools, WebORB exporter, and much more at the Community page.

Seriously, for $80 a seat, it’s a steal, and there are scalable packages for businesses. It’s worth a try.

Posted by Admin on 09/21 at 06:16 PM
Posted in: IT notes   • Comments (0) • Permalink

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