Balsamiq Mockups: A Review

As you can probably remember, my frequency of blog posts here has been reduced in the last months. The reason is simple: I’ve been engaged in a enterpreneur startup course, organized by Tetuan Valley in Barcelona. I had an idea for some time already to make a browser business management game, but with a funny touch. The result of all this activity is White Collar Game, still in development. You can check the project blog for more details.

I had to look for a suitable application for making mock-up screens quickly (and I mean really quickly!). Microsoft Visio was too “polished” to be really useful for quick mocking up and drawing by hand had the inconvenience of scanning and the costly retouching and modification.

I stumbled upon balsamiq studio’s Mockups, an Adobe AIR application available as both web and desktop application. The mockups are extremely easy to make: just drag a widget from the toolbar, double-click, write the text and that’s it. The application is updated really fast (almost every week) and there’s a huge repository of pre-made elements available at MockupsToGo. The look-and-feel of the mockups is just right: they aren’t hand-drawn but they look like that. It gives you this funny feeling of freedom to criticise and rearrange things, which is not easy to do with a more “polished” mockup that looks like it’s the real thing.

The fact I like the most, besides being almost perfect tool for doing mockups, is the fact that the company is also a startup, created by Peldi Guilizzoni as a side project when he was working at Adobe. Now he has established the company in Italy and keeps a really interesting blog about the company, including yearly figures and publicly disclosing the company insights in it.

For more information about the balsamiq Mockups tool, check this short video on YouTube.

Thumbs up for Balsamiq!