So, prototype it is. I fired up my Balsamiq for Desktop and in under ten minutes mockups of two pages were ready. This is one of them:

But when I sent them to Elen, I thought that maybe she meant some real code, or HTML stubs in real system, because there was a mockup attached to her original email. Here it is:

According to her, she made it in Paint (duh!). And it took her approximately 30 minutes to make this one, because she had to printscreen some real pages and cut pieces from them. What a tedious work! :-) And it must be a hell to modify such mockup!

When I told her about Balsamiq Mockups, she became very interested and decided to give it a try. Another happy story. Thank you, Peldi :-)

Related posts: Creating UI mockups with Balsamiq

In my past experience I have tried different ways of creating mockups:

1. hand-drawn pictures;
2. hand-drawn pictures, photographed with digital camera and inserted into requirement doc;
3. Visio documents (duh!);
4. some actual code.

While the last way serves some extra purposes (other than creating mockup itself), it takes a lot of time. And sometime you just need to share with others a picture you have in your head. Ways #1 and #2 serve very well, but have one major disadvantage: if you want to modify a picture, you have to redraw it from scratch (or make a mess from the original one). And yeah, Visio way does more harm than good: it takes enormous time to create a picture and then you often “forget” to update a mockup, because you don’t want to launch that app again.

So, what options do we have?

Recently I discovered an excellent piece of software, called Balsamiq Mockups. It is simple, effective and nice looking. It requires zero learning time. For example, I tried to create something for my personal project, yet another photo gallery. And I got this mockup ready in exactly 6 minutes after I started the demo:

Impressions: product – great, support – fast and fully satisfying, overall – have to get one.

Also I want to quote Charles William Stanton here:

Before, I was doing far too little GUI “prototyping” because either the results weren’t reusable or the effort took too long; now I fear I may be doing too much because it’s just that much fun.

Go to the product web site and see it for yourself.