Balsamiq Mockups for Wireframes
Every good web designer knows that wireframes are a must in the develoment cycle. Well thought out wireframes establish a solid layout and workflow for an application and are a primary means of ensuring client expectations throughout the project.
At Overmortal, we've dealt with clients in corporate situations where we've been the development house, while another company was brought in for design. Without question, the teams that used wireframes prior to designing elements of an application contributed much more to the overall satisfaction of the client.
A few month ago, I came across Balsamiq Mockups - an Adobe AIR application for wireframing. This lightweight application has most of what you could ask for in a wireframing solution. It's highly intuitive, fast and stays out of the designer's way. I played with the demo of the application for about twenty minutes before immediately purchasing a license for our primary designer. Balsamiq Mockups is so fast when creating wireframes that it's almost as fast as hand-drawing sketches on paper. That shows you how much of an emphasis the developers put on UX when building the application.
I have read some complaints about Balsamiq Mockups centering around its use of comic sans as a font, and its thick hand-drawn-looking lines for controls. I'm not a font nazi, so I could care less about comic sans. As far as the controls mimicking hand-drawn sketches, the basic concept is that the mockup resembles drawing items out with a Sharpie on paper. This suits us just fine. Mockups are not for details. Balsamiq Mockups has the right balance of detail and contraint that forces the designer to move on from mockups to hi-fi designs when the sketches start to become too detailed. This is key for any application that serves a specific niche.
If you're interested (and I recommend you at least give it a shot), Balsamiq Mockups comes in the Adobe AIR desktop flavor mentioned above, as well as plugin versions for Confluence, Jira and xWiki. I just wish there was an Eclipse plugin so we could use it right inside Aptana Studio.
