Unemployed Developer

At my prior job I had a very brief look at Balsamiq Mockups and I was really interested in what they offered to us developers. My experience with it was through receiving a bug writeup telling me about a new feature to one of our internal auditing systems. This bug writeup contained some screens created by Balsamiq Mockups, and as a developer it allowed me to visualize what the client wanted very easily. At the same time the client could also visualize what he was to get on the page when I was done.

I had a few interviews recently where I mentioned the name, Balsamiq Mockups and how cool it was! A couple interviewers wrote down the name of the software with promises to check it out. Hopefully they did and saw the awesome power that this software offered to us. I know Balsamiq Mockups is offering a personal licenseto potential do-gooders out there. I thought that my experience in the job interviews and with this blog I might, just might qualify for this license. I sent an email with my information and my do-gooder details not really expecting to receive a response. To my surprise 9 days later I received an email from the Better Half of Balsamiq Studios and not only that, I received the email at 2am my time. Why am I mentioning the arrival time of the email? Well I was tossing and turning in bed, decided to flip on my iPhone and check my email. Let’s just say I didn’t get any sleep that night.

However I guess I should start writing about the product itself and enough about me.

I found it hard at first to integrate Balsamiq Mockups into any website planning. In the past I’ve always done my mockups in my head or on a scrap piece of paper, to add this software into my web development planning, it was tough at first. I had to condition myself to utilize the software. Once I actually gave myself the time to make a mockup of my site, I actually felt much more refreshed about the project. Sometimes as I draw a mockup on paper, I hate the way I drew a portion of it and it’s hard to work when you aren’t happy with your draft work. In short Balsamiq requires discipline to use it over your preferred methods. Once you get used to it chances are, you may find that it’s a perfect product for your planning needs.

I printed out the mockup to see how it translated on paper, so that if I was presenting this to a client visually I could wow them. On paper it looked great, in fact it looked so great I wanted to get one of those laptops that have the touchscreen abilities so I could just sit and draw layouts like I used to, but instead of my poor drawings the outcome would be a really cool looking mockup with Balsimiq’s artwork.

Balsamiq’s interface is quite simple to use, it’s primary interaction is to allow the user to drag and drop items onto the screen and drag the components where you want them to be placed. Now they’ve taken it a step further from providing a simple drawing of the item, but you can change many attributes on the component, from text, size, alignment or even place an image you have already created into the component. Sometimes it can get a bit hard trying to navigate through all the components available, so there is a dynamic search box where you can type out the word of the component you are looking for. For example if you are looking for an image component you would start to type ‘image’ and a drop down with the component would pop up for you to select.

I could go on more about the ins and outs of Balsamiq, but I think that it’s worth trying out on your own accord and seeing if it makes sense for you and your projects. You can try out the online web version or download and purchase the desktop at: Balsamiq Studios.

In the meantime, check out this 5 minute video I made of myself attempting to create a copy of Unemployed Developer in Balsamiq Mockups.