Balsamiq

Can be expensive but luckily Balsamiq granted my organisation a free licence due to not for profit status

Integration with Google Drive as a standard feature, at the moment you have to pay extra

ROI is neutral. We've used it enough to justify the price.

People like the interface, so we use it mainly on customer-facing projects.

We also have Visio, so if it doesn't work well in Balsamiq, we go over to Visio.

Faster iteration time on website development.

Little time spend learning new tools.

Low cost of software.

Reduced dev cycle time on affiliate websites by 40%

Balsamiq saves us time by allowing us to create quick mock-ups that address client needs as they arise. We don't have to spend hours in a more complex design software like Photoshop to answer a simply question.

Balsamiq has a very easy learning curve. This allows us to free up design resources. We don't want our designers focusing on simple landing page mockups or display ads. Interns can easily use Balsamiq to create mocks for quick client approval without disturbing our more expensive employees.

Balsamiq helps our clients focus on user flows and contents rather than graphics, which often leads to better final designs.

It allows for a rapidly paced company where you need to move fast and iterate based on feedback (and you don't have a big team to do that).

Balsamiq has saved us time in the early phases of projects, where we want to show layout without distracting the client with other elements.

Significantly improved planning and delivery times.

Rework is significantly reduced, because after the information is collected, the models are made and they are reviewed with the client, showing the flow, fields, etc.

Projects close on time and it is easier to visualize with the client to approve scope changes, which translates into time and money.

Significantly improved planning and delivery times.

Balsamiq is extremely inexpensive, which means that any benefits gleaned from it are almost pure gain. It requires no upfront costs or IT involvement to install or administer (we use the web based version).

The biggest gain we see is minimizing development time. We now spend more time reviewing designs before they are implemented and making sure that they are going to work, before committing them to code. It is so much easier, faster, and cheaper to amend a wireframe than to rewrite code.

Conversely, if you are spending a ton of time putting together Photoshop/Illustrator mockups, you will save yourself a lot of design time by creating simpler mockups. In cases where the visual style and components are already set, making designs pixel-perfect often is not necessary.

I think that being able to use Balsamiq saves UX time and gives us opportunity to work on more projects.

Balsamiq has helped us move quickly with creating mockups for new features or improvements to existing features.

It has also helped unify the tool set that the UX team uses so we can share workload.

Balsamiq has allowed new users that are not previously familiar with robust graphic design software (ex: Adobe Illustrator) to get up and running quickly. The learning curve is very short.

It has improved collaboration within our team. We communicate ideas with it faster

It is a good tool for initial design phase or redesign phase and helped our company with the same

But we did purchase different tools for more interactivity

Ease of use—We have saved time and money by quickly onboarding new designers and non-designers to Balsamiq. The tool is extremely easy to use, so we can spend our effort and time in a more productive way than training someone on yet another tool.

The ability to quickly create low-fidelity wireframes that look very Sketch-like have led to the ease of communicating design ideas with stakeholders in an efficient, productive way. By communicating to stakeholders that a lo-fi design is “just an idea,” we’ve been able to have a lot of productive conversations that lead to solving design issues before we’ve spent a lot of time creating more detailed wireframes and prototypes. By that, we’ve saved a lot of cost in having to redesign things by catching issues early in the design process. In creating more polished designs, we’ve wasted a lot of time having stakeholders nit-pick about the fine details of a design. Balsamiq helps us avoid that wasted time and resources.

Again, ease of use has led to considerable ROI in many ways. Another way that its ease of use has benefited us is that we’ve been able to quickly iterate upon initial designs in a very fast way. Instead of taking weeks to begin and end a feedback loop, we can quickly hop onto Balsamiq, make quick edits, receive feedback, and integrate them within a day or two. For example, if a stakeholder says they want a design to look completely different from the initial version, it’s no big deal because Balsamiq makes it easy to do that. With other tools, creating a brand new design can take hours and hours, while Balsamiq has typically enabled us to create designs in less than an hour or two.

Certainly, the projects that utilize Balsamic mock-ups have fewer delays due to unexpected requirements.

The software is cheap enough. Giving the hourly rate we pay the UX designer, it pays for itself in one session.

Negative would be the first impression of the client. Be sure to set the expectation that they won't see final product.

I would love the team discount if possible.

Saves lots of time using templated items. Instead of spending a week building in PowerPoint, I could get mock ups setup within hours.

Allows other users to manipulate add in their own ideas, build upon, etc. Saves time from rebuilding from scratch

Saves time from coming up with colors, style, etc. As they have super down and dirty templates.

The product works very well for showing product owners and developers design ideas for purposes of discussion, debate and refinement.

The products also works very well for specifying new designs for developers. This is best done in a series of screens that show various screen states and user interactions.

I also use the products to document bugs in software products and websites we have developed. This includes outlining and documenting bugs and changes to user interactions and refinements to the usability of completed interfaces and user experiences.

It has definitely saved time when negotiating interface changes with a large variety of stakeholders

Building a new layout is very quick and saves a lot of time when prototyping any clean basic interface

All of this eventually leads to better functionality for less money, which while hard to quantify is very useful

The only potential negative impact is that the design features are limited so may discourage the use of custom features which would have been particularly useful.

The yearly cost is totally reasonable. My manager looked at me like "Why are you bothering me with this? Just expense it."

For the newbies that roll on, I just have them poke around on the site and find training that suites them. I've done that multiple times and there training is fine. I only answer questions after they've tried their hand at it first. Easy to pick up.

You have to pay by credit card, which was an annoyance to Accounting. They prefer an invoice. But it wasn't a difficult hurdle to overcome.

Balsamiq empowered [our] product team to create prototypes without using design resource

Prototypes can be created faster which means more iterations and faster delivery

The wireframes can be produced in a very clean manner using Balsamiq so that the development team can understand the mockups without much explanation.

It can be more time-consuming to "think" while designing in Balsamiq. It is still faster to rapidly sketch/think and then maybe translate a final design to Balsamiq for consistency.

Setting up each button, module, navigation, option in Balsamiq is initially time-consuming - but the payoff is high when some sections can be copy-pasted - they add to consistency and time-saving eventually.

I like that we were able to buy the program for one lump sum payment and didn't have to keep paying each month like Photoshop makes you do.

Definitely good ROI as we were able to complete some wireframes for a software pretty quickly.

It had a positive impact overall on the business in terms of Return on Investment.

It certainly increased the productivity within the project.

It would have been great if it also had a feature to collaborate as well.