Balsamiq

The first impression might be disorienting. There are very few interface elements on the screen. Start exploring however, and you'll find out that Mockups is filled with powerful yet only-visible-when-you-need-them features.

Getting your ideas out should be effortless. We sweat the details so the app gets out of your way, instead of forcing you to learn it. You won't see many dialog windows interrupting your flow, and you won't have to twiddle with options all the time.

Mockups really shines during the early stages of designing a new interface.

Mockups is zenware, meaning that it will help you get "in the zone", and stay there. Our aim is for you to forget our software is there at all.

Mockups offers the same speed and rough feel as sketching with pencil, with the advantage of the digital medium: drag & drop to resize and rearrange elements, make changes without starting over, and your work is clear enough that you'll make sense of them later.

Mockups intentionally makes your wireframes scream both This is not final! and I just threw this together, eliciting honest feedback, which results in better wireframes, easier-to-use features, and happier users of your product. That's what it's all about.

We realize being the in-between tool is a hard balance to strike, but we think we're doing a pretty good job at it and we're committed to it. It's why we created Mockups in the first place.

Getting Support

If you have any questions, try the F.A.Q.s, the Mockups Documentation, or the community forums. You can always shoot us an email and we'll get back to you within a few hours.

Learning Mockups

If you're just getting started, take a look at our documentation and tutorials and tips and tricks videos, they'll help you get the most out of our little tool.

Learning UX Design

We created UX Apprentice to introduce you to UX basics as you learn the craft of UX Design.

1. we're not huge fans of building large prototypes. Too many times we've seen people spend a lot of time putting a fully interactive prototype together, then realizing that some features couldn't actually be built or noticing that the user experience wasn't so great once they implemented the prototype. The problem with prototypes is that they take time to build. When you spend time building something, you start getting attached to it, and changing it becomes painful.
   We believe it's much better to wireframe the key screens, implement them, see how they feel and go back to the wireframes to tweak them if needed. You won't be attached to the wireframes, and you'll have spent time learning about what works and what doesn't using the real codebase, and real users!
2. Letting you specify behaviors and click-actions would inevitably turn Mockups into a much more complex tool, which is a terrible thing for us: if we want to continue to be the in-between tool, Mockups needs to be extremely quick to learn so that every stakeholder can have their say with an equal playing field.

There are lots of quick and easy ways to specify interaction in Mockups already. If you're curious to know more about where Mockups fits into the UX Design process, check out UX Apprentice.

We know that there are some scenarios where you may prefer to build complex, highly interactive prototypes. For those, try out Axure RP ($589) or Omnigraffle Pro ($199.99). You may notice that they have a steeper learning curve, are slower to use, cost a lot more than Mockups, and are backed by large companies. They have to be: the problem they're trying to solve is much much larger than ours.

Not sure if Balsamiq Mockups is the right tool for you? Here's a handy guide to help you choose.

We know that Mockups works best when everyone on your product team has a copy, so we want to keep it affordable even at volume prices (our $429, 5 user license is our best seller).

Being low-cost doesn't mean we're cheap. We put our heart and soul into making Mockups the best quality software we possibly can. We embrace rigorous software quality assurance practices; we test early and often, both manually and with code. We spend days on performance improvements, platform-specific bugs and tiny little things you'd only notice if they were broken. We release often — about once a month — to get those bug fixes in your hands as fast as possible. Then we follow up each release with fanatical customer support.

We take pride in our software's quality and customer support. It's something we like to compete on. Obviously no software is without bugs, and we have our share. Our difference is that we make it really easy for you to submit your feedback, we treat your bug reports seriously, consider your feature requests with an open mind, and do our best to work with you to solve your problems in a timely manner.

Author Bob Walsh interviewed 9 Balsamiq users who tell their success stories using Mockups.

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