Wireframing & Prototyping Tools: Balsamiq & Friends

For last month’s meeting of the NHUPA, a number of people did short presentations and demos of a variety of wireframing and prototyping tools.

I presented Balsamiq, a low-fidelity wireframing tool best used for capturing ideas quickly, keeping people focused on concepts/layout or for teaching new user experience designers about wireframing.

I figured someone might find it helpful to have access to the PowerPoint slides each presenter used. Each set of slides includes a description of the output you’ll get from the tool, the factors that differentiate it from the others and a list of strengths and weaknesses. The tools covered in this PowerPoint file include:

• iPlotz
• Microsoft Expression Blend SketchFlow
• Protoshare
• Balsamiq Mockups
• Axure
• Mockup Screens
• ForeUI

Links are included within the slides to each of the above prototyping tools’ websites. If you don’t own MS PowerPoint, you can still open these files with OpenOffice or Google Docs.