Balsamiq Reviews and Ratings

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a Product Manager, I use Balsamiq to create Low low-fidelity mockups of the UI Screens to visually orient the Cross-Functional Teams of the Proposed Solutions. The solution in terms of new features is created post due diligence of the Business Problem Statements and is shared with the cross-functional team to get their agreement on clarity in problem statement and scope. Balsamiq helps in this process to make the cross-functional teams aware of the UI solution & scope way before the actual high-fidelity wireframes are created.

Likelihood to Recommend

Balsamiq is well suited to just mock up something in a quick time before actually developing the detailed wireframes.

Balsamiq is not useful when you want to get the detailed wires to be passed on to the engineers to get them developed.

So if you just want to work on the 1st part, then this is a good tool but if it's your job to make the journey from 1st Part to the 2nd then this tool is not the answer.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Balsamiq for a range of applications. Firstly, I use it for ideation and creating mock ups to flesh out ideas. Secondly, I use it to create wireframes for quick communication with clients. Lastly I use it for verification and collaboration with clients. I find that it is much more effective for requirements elicitation to have something visual drawn up and Balsamic is fast and easy.

Likelihood to Recommend

Balsamiq is a great tool for quickly getting ideas into visual form. At first it seems like there are not that many UI assets, but this constraint actually adds to the speed. There are less things for you to fuss over, you can focus on getting your ideas down. This is a tool for lofi rough drawings not a tool for building beautiful prototypes for developers to code to. It is fantastic for ideation because you mostly just drag and drop components onto the canvas and move things around. It's great in a live workshop setting for that reason.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Balsamiq is used in my organisation to assist in the development of systems. Usually in the early stages of development, we will use Balsamiq to mock up screen designs / prototype the UI / UX of the system. We also use it to mock up changes as part of a change request or new screens when the system is in the maintenance phase. It is an excellent product that makes it very easy to quickly produce high quality mock ups and prototypes. It is used in the development team of the IT services department.

Likelihood to Recommend

Balsamiq is very well suited for mocking up / prototyping UIs for systems or apps. The really good thing about it is that the wireframes it produces do not look like real screens but all the same do look nice, neat and tidy. This allows you to express and design how your interface will looks and even work, but it also expresses that these are just wireframes. I have had problems throughout my career when I have mocked up UIs with HTML, often users and stakeholders think that the system is ready to be used or not far off, they can't seem to grasp that there is nothing behind it. Balsamiq helps here because the wireframes are in a hand drawn style, so they can't be confused with a near-ready or working system.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Multiple people at my company use this for software design mockups. We've used it to gain approval for the pages in a customer's portal, including how customers would be funneled and traverse them (depending upon their goals), and how processes would work through APIs we are developing. For this type of design, we previously used Visio.

Likelihood to Recommend

Anytime you have a process to map out to show others we think it works well. It is easy for multiple people to get in, review, and add their thoughts. The look and feel is nice and even the marked-up version with notes looks presentable enough to show management to get approval/buy-in. We still use Visio for things like swim lanes.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently, we use Balsamic to quickly create wireframes that “feel” like wireframes. In other words, we use Balsamic to create designs that communicate the idea of a design to stakeholders without presenting a design that looks “finished.” The benefit to this is that our stakeholders don’t get too tied to what a potential finished design may look like, so they can contribute big-picture feedback that helps us create a high-fidelity wireframes that answer their needs. When we offer stakeholders more polished designs earlier in the design process, we find that they get too wrapped up in the details and end up offering feedback that is less relevant to solving the design need.

Likelihood to Recommend

Balsamiq is excellent for creating low-fidelity wireframes where the designer is trying to communicate a general, loose idea of how the design should look. Because of this, it should be used early in the design stage, when there are still many decisions to be made about how the final design should look like. However, it is less suitable for situations where one wants to communicate a more final-appearing version of a design. There are limited functionalities (which appear intentional, as the Balsamiq website says that the tool "has 'just enough' prototyping capabilities, but not more”). Because of this, it is likely wise to choose a more high-powered tool, such as Axure, to create a fuller design toward the later stages of the design process.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Balsamiq to create quick mockups for website design. This process tends to cover rough drafts, copy, layout, image needs, and other high-level ideas. It's much faster than using a more technical product and the fact that it's "low res" by design helps collaborators focus on high-level feedback and not get caught up in minutia.

Likelihood to Recommend

Balsamiq is great if you're a non-designer and want to share ideas with people who will be executing design or front-end development. It's also good for getting feedback from non-designers as well - the fact that you can only create "crude" mockups helps the people you're sharing with give comments on fundamental issues like content and layout and avoid getting bogged down in fine design details.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We create a great deal of affiliate properties, and since the business case comes from marketing, we often need to describe mockups in detail to our in-house design team. Balsamiq helps us standardize the design process and give an even means of communication from marketing to design channels with little risk of misinterpretation or conjecture.

Likelihood to Recommend

<ul><li>For a business scenario in which marketing is in need of constant design solutions but the structure of the company isn't amenable to sourcing design ideas or there is no process for sourcing UX resources at all.</li><li> Useful for marketing companies with a primarily online presence. Useful for nascent designers looking to understand the keystones of using design elements.</li></ul>

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

<p>Balsamiq is simply a quick way of drawing out your idea and is easy to pick up and put down. When you launch Balsamiq, your previous "Mock-ups" are ready and waiting.</p><p></p><p>Its great for mapping out a system diagram, but excellent for application/web development. Each item you add to the page has a "Link" function will allow you to link this to another mock-up. This means that you can mock up a website then when you preview it, all of the links work and take you to other pages. The beauty of it is that you do not have to be a web developer to make a great mock-up. We find it very useful to plan our ideas and then hand our mock-ups over for them to develop.</p>

Likelihood to Recommend

Balsamiq is the easiest way to lay out a design without pen and paper. Quick ways to design without having to get into the nitty gritty of UI design. The ability to turn around designs quicker and with ease.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Balsamiq for low fidelity wireframes early in the design process. Because of its intentionally ugly approach (Comic Sans, anyone?), it allows us, and the client, to focus on layout and not get distracted by colors, fonts, or other design elements that come later.

Likelihood to Recommend

<div>Quick, rough wireframes that show layout without getting into the weeds of colors, fonts, or exacting element placement. In the vendor's own words:</div><div>Split the problem in small chunks &gt; make a quick wireframe of key screens &gt; tweak wireframe &gt; incorporate feedback &gt; build working screen as quickly as you can &gt; iterate until solid.

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Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Balsamiq is primarily used by our UX department to wireframe concepts prior to design.Creating wireframes in black and white before moving into the design phase helps us (and our clients) focus on the user flows and the on-page content rather than colors and graphics. We find that this leads to more thoughtful, effective final products. Balsamiq is also a great way to create quick mock-ups of existing pages to facilitate problem-solving conversations with clients.

Likelihood to Recommend

Balsamiq is great for non-designers or less-sophisticated users. It's great for creating quick mock-ups, and it's great for focusing on user-flows and content prior to the design phase. However, I think that most designers will find this program too elementary for their needs. In my opinion, there's not a compelling reason for a skilled designer to use Balsamiq over Sketch for wireframing, since Sketch can so easily be parlayed into a complete design whereas Balsamiq cannot. If you need a software for creating quick mockups and you are not a designer, Balsamiq is for you. If you're a graphic designer, go somewhere else.