Mockups with Balsamiq

Many of the practices that we apply in agile development teams emphasis deferring commitment. This is one of the ways we stay agile. If we have written a sentence on a story card and subsequently decide we don’t need that story we can rip it up, very little has been lost. Compare this with costly requirements specifications, a small change can trigger significant re-work.

In the same way, when specifying a user interface it can be helpful to defer commitment while expressing the need succinctly. Often we can use white boards and/or paper mock-ups to develop screen flows in meetings with customers. This can help us play with alternatives and walk through scenarios while avoiding the cost of mocking up in html or photoshop.

Balsamiq Mockups offers the logical next step. By retaining the style of a paper mock-up we can avoid becoming too attached to one design. A slick user interface helps us build screens quickly and provides most of the components we are likely to need.

However, for me the killer feature is the confluence integration. I use confluence every day, many of my clients use confluence for project documentation, this integration means that the documents can be found by all concerned, edited in place and version controlled.

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