EclecticGuy

Anyone that knows me knows that I L.O.V.E. Balsamic Vinegar! Well, this post has nothing to do with that passion! balsamiq is a a Micro ISV based in Italy. I have had a long-standing passion for Micro ISVs too! My first company, PiWare, which I started back in the late 70s was a Micro ISV. There were lots of us back then in the early days of personal computers. We didn’t call ourselves Micro ISVs though! I maintained PiWare until about 1989 and brought 8 products to market on Apple //, Apple // GS, and Macintosh computers. It was great fun but was really more of a super hobby for me as I pursued my Ph.D. in Inorganic Main Group Chemistry at the University of Colorado.

Until I stumbled across balsamiq, my all-time favorite Micro ISV was Ed Hamrick of Hamrick Software, developer of VueScan. I’ve never met Ed but I did spend several hours on the phone and many email exchanges with him a few years ago when I started Pixingo (a Mini ISV). Ed has a fantastic product and business – the type to envy if you are a “do it yoursefer”. Hamrick held the spot as “super hero” in my mind for more than a decade, then along comes Peldi Guilizzoni of balsamiq.

While I was doing some research on Crowdsourcing, I came across a Blog post on ReadWriteWeb on helping Twitter find a revenue model – maybe the ultimate in crowdsourcing! As I read through the comments I came across Peldi Guilizzoni’s posts on his use of Twitter for targeted marketing of his company’s products. The first thought through my mind was “Brilliant!” (followed closely by “When’s lunch?). Peldi is the brain and braun behind balsamiq. As I dug in to the company (I hadn’t even looked at what their product was yet!) I discovered a kindred entrepreneurial spirit! Then I looked at the product, Mockups!

Mockups is a newgen application for mocking up software user interfaces. Sort of paper prototyping on steroids. Those that know me also know that I am passionate about usability and involving users as early in the inception and design phase as possible. I’ve played with a lot of prototyping tools in the past and am an avid paper prototyper. In fact, my company shipped Genesys in 1989 – a tool that allowed a developer to draw their user interface and Genesys would generate source code in their choice of 65816 Assembly Language, Pascal, C or Apple RES format. [This is COOL! A quick Google turned up this link on Genesys: http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/genesys/ It even has a screenshot of our manual!]

Mockups was designed to be as simple as possible but yet allow rapid design and design exploration. It has a retro hand-drawn look and appeal to it too. As a newgen app, it can run as a desktop application on WIndows, Macs or Linux, as well as in a browser or even embedded in a Wiki! Versions supporting the commercial Atlassian Confluence or OpenSource XWiki are available. This is truly brilliant and shows how the power of Wikis can be very effectively exploited for team-based product design as well as getting customers involved in the design process.

I’ve been using the trial version of Mockups heavily for a day now (both desktop and XWiki versions) and have a good handle on how it works and where it’s strengths and weaknesses (very few) are. In many ways, Mockups is like a drawing program with a library of over 60 pre-drawn UI controls. These look just like you drew them with paper and pencil!

(from the balsamiq samples)

I think the hand-drawn look helps reinforce that notion that this is a design idea and not a polished product. I used to use Photoshop with a collection of UI images to build screen designs that looked so real that users just assumed they were a final product and got bogged down in little details and not the big picture around usability. Mockup allows the designer and test subject to see the bigger picture of usability.

Just for grins, I used Mockups to prototype a Fly Tying database product I developed a few years ago. It took all of 5 minutes – without having read any on-line help – to create the main screen and several dialogs. It would have taken me longer with paper and pencil since I do a lot of erasing!

Mockups is so easy and fun to use that I found myself drawing designs for several product ideas I have had floating in my head. Now I have captured these and can share them with others. The XWiki embedded version of Mockups automatically versions edits – a very cool feature that allows you to see how an idea evolved over time. Since the mockup is embedded on a Wiki page, you can annotate, comment and collaborate seamlessly.

I’m sure that I will have more to say about balsamiq and Mockups in future posts, but for now, if you are a software developer or designer, give Mockups a serious look.