At the risk of sounding like a shameless peddler of commercial software, I would seriously recommend Balsamiq Mockups. Now, let my intentions be clear… I made an agreement with Valerie from Balsamiq that I would write a review of this software on my blog in exchange for a testing license. Look, what can I say… I was born Jewish.

Now, just because I received a free license to review the software it does not mean that will not point out the egregious problems that I find with the software, nor will I ramble on about how fantastic it is. All I will say is this: If you deal with clients often that have not got any creative done for a prospective project and are looking for Interface Design advice, this is the tool for you!

Onto the review…

Overview

Balsamiq Mockups is an AIR application built to help you mock up application interface designs in the timeframe of a (non-metric) “jiffy”. Since i’ve started using the application, i’ve put together numerous mockups for clients and always received good feedback. What Balsamiq lacks in extensibility it makes up for in sheer speed of use.
The application is well thought out and concise. No instruction manual or cerebral documentation necessary! As far as AIR applications go, this is one of the more advanced ones I’ve seen, and it certainly is a pleasure to work with. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it justifies a $79 price-tag, but it is well worth the loot.

Tooling and Extensibility

As far as tools go, the Balsamiq developers certainly went out of their way. Included in the application are over 75 user-interface components from Buttons to Charts to iPhones, as well as loads of icons that will provide the finishing touches on any rough cut. The components are all customizable, scalable and z-axis-orderable, and the keyboard shortcuts help you get the job done quite quickly once you’re comfortable with the application.

The application fails abysmally when it comes to extensibility; I would imagine that with an application like this, the developers should facilitate the downloading of custom component/icon packs, or even user-submitted ones. This could as quite an interesting angle to the application i feel. Another thing I wish it included was some sort of color palette to slightly adjust the components. I’m assuming that it wouldn’t be too much trouble to include a little color-transform slider to add a bit more dimension to the components for added visual cues.

Good thing i downloaded the latest version (1.6.67 released on 24th Feb 2010) before i started ranting about the absence of the spacebar-invoked panning functionality… Good job guys! Works great :)

Search, Export and Memory Usage

The search functionality of Balsamiq is intuitive and responsive; scanning through different UI elements is a breeze and makes the whole experience that much more impressive. Balsamiq offers exporting your mockups to both PNG (why not JPG?) and PDF (go Thibault!) and it usually exports the mockups without problems. I’ve noticed that when my mockups become quite intense, the application does begin to lag a little though, but i’m confident that the developers are looking into that for future releases.

Conclusion

All in all, this is an indispensable tool for the discerning web developer & designer. If you need to give your clients an idea of what you’re going to produce and you have limited time, give this application a shot. Thanks to the Balsamiq team for the great addition to my development ammunition!