Do It Fast And Do It Well

Those are the two things I’ve always wanted from a wireframing tool. I just want to sit down, and with the image in my head, be able to dump it on the screen in a matter of minutes. No tool – and I’ve looked at many tools over the years – provided me with both features. Most often, it was the “do it fast” that failed.

Finally!

Not so with Balsamiq Mockups. This is a tools written by people who use it and you can tell. It’s got a good, if not exhaustive, library of elements. It’s got a highly intelligent editor. The properties are minimal, but on target. Most importantly, you can export/save the wireframe in the formats that architects and interactive engineers use.

Example

The folks internally wanted me to throw together a quick Flex app for effort metrics on our team. After talking about basic requirements, I had an image in my head of what the UI might look like. Nothing is more frustrating that having this image in your head and (unless you use paper and pencil) not being able to realize it for 45 minutes.

I did this mockup in just around 8 minutes.
wireframe

Recommend

I very rarely endorse a product publicly, and I really have to love it to do so. This is one of those cases. I highly recommend that you demo this product, and if you are ever responsible for coming up with wireframes, conceptual designs, or just any kind of visual aid for architecting applications, you will love this app.