Item: Balsamiq
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Balsamiq

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Balsamiq is being used by 2 or 3 departments. This is helping product developers, engineers, and application designers see a basic idea and allows for them to be on the same page. It helps engineering, especially, because it is quicker than a full mockup and allows for quick turnaround with feedback allowing for bigger changes to occur early and often, rather then being locked into a design and wasting time trying to change it.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Quick to make changes
Easy to use and understand what you need
There are wireframes objects for almost any type of UI imaginable

Cons

More icons selection
Not having to store and keep assets with the wireframe
Easier to share and collaborate at the same time

Return on Investment

It has been a positive impact in keeping engineering from implementing something before we have a general idea from application design. Now we can have a basic direction before getting the color scheme later.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Photoshop

I use a combination of both products, I use Balsamiq for quick wireframes to get the over all UI layout hammered out. I then use Photoshop to better design color scheme and exact padding.

Other Software Used

Visual Studio.NET, Adobe Photoshop, NetBeans

Likelihood to Recommend

If you're looking for a final mockup, Basamiq will not look as pretty as Photoshop. For displaying a basic concept or idea it is perfect. Now if only I could do full use cases in one smooth motion it would be perfect.

Comments

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Virgin Pereira
commented 8 years ago
Hi there, Thanks a lot for your review! We love to hear what's working well for our users, as well as anything we could improve. Speaking of the latter, we thought some information might be useful to share: About icons, we now use the Font Awesome icon set. It contains over 500 icons in a wide range of categories and it's also updated frequently. More details here: https://docs.balsamiq.com/desktop/icons/ Regarding the assets, I assume that you'd like a better way to share them between multiple projects, right? We plan to improve this in the future, so I'm adding your vote for it. It will help to prioritize the request. We'd also love to bring real-time collaboration to all our products. For now, it's available in three of them, as detailed here: https://support.balsamiq.com/desktop/sharing/#real-time-collaboration We'll get there! :) Thanks again. Feel free to reach out via support@balsamiq.com if you need anything else. -Virgin from Balsamiq

Wiring up with Balsamiq