Whilst in a meeting yesterday, we were discussing with our subject matter experts and key stakeholders options for how we would implement a piece of additional functionality into the existing application we have built.
Time and commercial pressures meant there was no time to involve anyone from our Interactive Media team back at the office as the Customer wanted to discuss the detail there and then. Words were simply not enough so instead of the usual approach of reverting to the whiteboard I decided to load up a great tool that I recently downloaded called Balsamiq Mockups (www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups). The claim on their website was that it allowed you to “Create software mockups in minutes”.
Ten minutes later we had talked some more and created the following two screen mock-ups...
I am very fortunate in that my current company, we have a dedicated team of experts in the user experience and visual design space so usually I get to work alongside someone from the team to solve such a problem.
However, not all project teams are afforded this luxury and given the speed that I was able to get up to speed with Balsamiq and the impact it had on the meeting I shall definitely be using it again in my role as a Business Analyst and recommending it to others.
My next goal is to better understand the synergies between a tool such as Balsamiq and the more traditional approaches to wireframing e.g. Visio so please check my blog again over the coming months for further details of my experiences with Balsamiq.