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Wouldn’t it be great to sit down next to your client and sketch out ideas?  Now there’s an online, user-friendly tool called Balsamiq Mockups that allows you to do that remotely.

Balsamiq Mockups helps you and your team or clients iterate on wireframes as early in the process as possible, when it’s cheapest to do so.  Not surprisingly, it was developed by a former Macromedia/Adobe software engineer.  

Balsamiq Mockups hits the bulls-eye for firms like DesignMind.  We can use this inexpensive tool to rapidly create mock-ups of both desktop and web applications.  It’s got a lot of power, and is easy to learn.  One of the really great ideas in this tool is that the prototypes look hand-drawn.  This informal appearance makes stakeholders more comfortable about giving the developers early feedback, which is so incredibly valuable.

I learned about Balsamiq Mockups last week when Don Robins spoke to the San Francisco .NET User Group.  (Don, a principal at Outformations, gave a great overview of SQL Server Compact Edition.)   

Software Application Developers have long struggled with ways to help their clients visualize what an application will look like, early in the project.  These days developers communicate their user interface designs in many ways, all the way from whiteboard sketches, Visio diagrams, Excel, and at the high end, complex software visualization systems such as iRise.

If you aren’t doing prototyping, or if you’re using the paper, Visio, or Excel approach, you can elevate your development process easily with this product.  Thanks to Don for spending some of his presentation demonstrating the Balsamiq tool.

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