Balsamiq Blog

Spending a lot of time on the website

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 27th, 2008 under Branding / Marketing — No Comment

Maybe because the clent-side of mockups is in pretty good shape, maybe because I bought two Web Usability related books and got sucked in by them, maybe because I’m a little afraid of really diving into the server-side work, I have been spending most of my time this week on the website.

Like the 37signals guys say, text is UI, so coming up with the right choice of words is crucial. Then Nielsen says to cut it in half, and to make it readable to an 8th grader. I now understand how valuable good copy editors are.

It’s hard work for me (being ESL and all), but I welcome the challenge. There’s always time to tweak some more right?

I also have been experimenting with other site designs that don’t look quite as much like 37signals.com – I definitely don’t want to steal their look when I go public with this and I want my site to have my own distinctive design – but I have to tell you, I consider their site to be NEAR-PERFECT, dang it. I can tell that they have been reading the same books I am and took their tips to heart. How do you improve perfection? Anyways I’ll keep reading up, maybe I’ll find something to improve and change my design in the process.

One thing I noticed is that their links don’t change colors when visited, so I immediately changed mine to do so. Ha!

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Import/Export, new “first time experience”…

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 24th, 2008 under Books, Development / Technical — No Comment

Hi it’s me again. Today was a good day. I just updated the build with the following:

• improved “first time experience”: when you first open the app you’ll see a sample mock-up with some instructions and tips. To see it, do this: select all, delete, reload the page. A mockup like this one should appear:

• added import/export feature: Export basically gives you an XML representation of the mockup, Import reads such a string and turns it back into a mockup. Why is this important? It enables a number of things: it’s now easy to duplicate a mockup, which I think is a common thing people want to do (duplicate then tweak the second to show another step in the user interface – I hate that Gliffy doesn’t have this for instance).I chose a human-readable format like XML because proprietary data formats are BAD and open ones are in vogue these days AND enable all sorts of innovation. For instance, someone else could write a converter from my “mockup XML” to MXML or other languages…see where I’m going?

  I like it when a small feature opens up many doors like this.

• fixed some bugs here and there, added a “paragraph” text control, made some defaults better…I forget what else.

Give it a spin: http://www.balsamiq.com/demos/mockups/Mockups.html

As always, if you use it for something real I’d love to see your PNGs!

BTW, I just finished reading (ok really it was more like “devouring”) this book – it’s required reading, it will change you. It totally confirmed hunches I had and reinforced them.

This is so much fun!

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I cut another feature, yay!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 24th, 2008 under Development / Technical — 2 Comments

My new thing is cutting features. I love it, it gives me a great sense of accomplishment. The product becomes leaner and more clear, more focused and more usable each time. And I save on time, bugs, worry…it’s great. Of course it’s easy not that I haven’t shipped yet…

Today it was the use of “lorem ipsum” in the text controls. It just doesn’t matter, and I read this whole article on how lorem ipsum results in worse designs – I wouldn’t want my software to help you build bad software, quite the opposite!

I also fixed some bugs (thanks Seth!) and made some other small improvements here and there.

I also moved the demo to its new, hopefully more permanent home (URL below). Don’t pay too much attention to the site, I suspect it will change a lot.

Coming up on my TODO list, roughly in this order:

• improve the “blank slate” experience by addin a sample mock-up with instructions. This is actually a bit hard since it relies on the import/export feature, which I need to do anyways
• fix the drag-and-drop experience
• finish groups (man it’s hard)
• add some more controls like tabs, menus, links, datagrid, and about 25 more I have on my list
• and of course see if I can cut any more features: right now the “search ui library” search-box is next on the chopping block. If you  have strong opinions on why I SHOULDN’T cut it, speak now.

One note: my wonderful wife Mariah has agreed to re-draw all of my UI controls. It will still be hand-drawn (it’s a feature!), but it will look a little cleaner, with a little thinner lines, maybe a little more colorful and it will definitely have that woman’s touch, which I think is awesome and very important for any piece of good software.

Ok back to the grindstone, stay tuned and keep that feedback coming

New URL: http://www.balsamiq.com/demos/mockups/Mockups.html

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New website

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 22nd, 2008 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — No Comment

I bought “Prioritizing Web Usability (VOICES)“, scanned its table of contents and was immediately dissatisfied with my previous website.

At around the same time I found the 37signals website again, and loved it. I think those guys do a lot of things right.

So I took their site and put my content in it, just temporarely. I changed a few things but I left the basic CSS intact. I’m sure they won’t mind since I’m still stealth and I’ll change everything again before I go live. It just helps me put the website content in a structure that I like more. I’ll deal with the visual redesign later.

Check it out: http:///www.balsamiq.com (you already have user and pwd since you got here)

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