I’ve heard about Balsamiq Mockups, but after seeing this tweet (“FYI, Balsamiq rocks for UI mock ups. Thanks @joeybeninghove for showing it to me!“) by Joel, I had to take a look.

I spent about 15 minutes using it and love it!  I was in analysis paralysis last night and needed to break out of it.  Basically, I created a screen that sucks – it’s fugly and not intuitive at all and I needed to fix it.  Instead of hacking around in Visual Studio trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I hit the Balsamiq site and very quickly laid out what I think I want the screen to be.  The cool thing is that the output looks like I sketched it in pencil.

I’ve always been a big fan of pencil and paper for initial screen design because it helps me focus.  My problem with that method is that if I want to show anyone, I need to scan the paper and then email it — this was no big deal up until my scanner died about a month ago.   With Balsamiq, I can quickly and easily save the design to an image file.

I plan on using over the next couple of weeks to produce some prototypes for another client.

Check it out if you get some time!