Cooking Up Quick Mockups
February 24, 2017

Cooking Up Quick Mockups

Grant Wilkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Balsamiq

Balsamiq is software being used by the UX Design team for the e-commerce channel of Northern Tool + Equipment. Balsamiq provides a great way for us to quickly create mockups and prototypes to share with other members of our team and project stakeholders. The style of Balsamiq elements intentionally looks cartoony. This helps communicate to others that it's a work in progress and not a finished pixel perfect mockup.
  • Pre-built icon and widget library has every web page element you can think of. This speeds up mockup creation.
  • The ability to export mockups into both PNG and PDF format is great for emailing, sharing, attaching to project tickets.
  • There is now a tabbed interface that allows you to quickly move between in progress mockups.
  • The auto save feature prevents you from losing your work.
  • While the icon, element, and widget library is diverse, it would be nice to have a view where you can see all of the icons at once instead of having to scroll them horizontally.
  • It would be nice to be able to 'favorite' commonly used icons and widgets to find them again quickly.
  • The document boundaries (aka artboard from Adobe Illustrator) automatically crops to the elements on the page. This is not always helpful and you sometimes have to move the entire mockup to make room in the layout for additional sections at the top of the layout.
  • 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.
We also have Adobe Illustrator. Balsamiq is a great choice when you value speed and want to use the pre-built icons to put together an interface. It is also a slimmed down feature set versus Illustrator and gives you just the essentials. Balsamiq is easier for non-graphic designers to pick up and learn quickly.
Balsamiq is a great tool for getting mockups put together quickly. Its focus is on speed and so it's fairly simple. If you need a low cost and lightweight tool to just get up and running, this is where Balsamiq makes an excellent choice. If you're looking for a robust UX tool to create interactive layouts, then there are probably better choices available.