Comments on: Wireframing and prototyping tools

By: Alex Horstmann

Alex Horstmann — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:58:42 +0000

I know that we’re both big fans of sketchy wireframes and Comic Sans, to the extent that I now have a soft spot for that font!

By: Nimbleogre

Nimbleogre — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:48:01 +0000

Alex… I think Omnigraffle, Viso are pretty industry standard now so was intresed to see if any one has used any of the new tools. Thanks for the feed back on Balsamiq, wierdly I know a few UX people who don’t like to due to the face it uses comic sans.

By: Alex Horstmann

Alex Horstmann — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:26:23 +0000

Hey Ben,

No Omnigraffle! That is one of my favourites, along with Visio!

I’ve played with Balsamiq and it’s quick and easy to sketch up prototypes, but (when I used it) has a limited stencil set.

It seemed to be good for beginner/non-UX users but not powerful enough for practitioners.

My €0.02!

By: Gemma

Gemma — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:21:38 +0000

I’ve used Balsamiq and LovelyCharts.

I liked Balsamiq, but it just didn’t feel comprehensive enough to do a whole project. I think its good for sketching ideas before taking them into a more ‘tooled up’ application.

I didn’t like LovelyCharts – it looks like it’ll do everything you want, but in the end its hard to organise, has confusing or hard to get to controls and was just frustrating to use.

I use OmniGraffle and I love it. The only gripe I have with OmniGraffle is it thinks it knows where to draw connection lines between objects better than I do… grrrrr

Hope that helped a little!
Gemma