Balsamiq Blog

Weekly Update: a month from launch

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 25th, 2008 under Company / Business, Development / Technical, Mockups — No Comment

The main new and exciting development this week is that I have decided to start selling the Dekstop (AIR) version of Mockups. I’ll write a blog post about it this week, but basically it comes down to this: people are begging to give me their money for it, and it will be a source of income until wikis become mainstream (in a year or two?).

For the latest updates on what I did this week, you can read my Twitters here: http://twitter.com/balsamiq

In short:

• huge performance improvements by REMOVING some code. Yes!
• improving the desktop version with New / “You have unsaved changes” dialog / better PNG export, etc. Now that it’s a product I’d better give it some love…more to come this week (not a lot more)
• new UI control (Modal Screen) – a couple more are coming
• two new blog posts.
• made direct contact with my favorite blogger of all time. Cross your fingers for me please.

This week:

• more UI controls
• more bug fixing for AIR version
• more PR effort (I found a few other blogs to target)
• I need to spend a little time in PivotalTracker to write down everything that I want to do and prioritize it
• I am going to request for feedback on the site from the Business of Software forums (nice big vocal community of small companies)

Oh, and this is what I have been looking at from my window in the last few days while I work.

That’s my dad playing with my son at my dad’s country-side house. So beautiful.

Ciao for now,
Peldi

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Making RSS work for your micro-ISV

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 21st, 2008 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — 2 Comments

I just love RSS. I can’t remember what life was like before it. I get all my news that way, via Google Reader on my iGoogle home page.

I thought I’d share how I use it to keep my finger on the pulse with “all things Balsamiq” on the web.

Here’s what I follow under the “balsamiq” tag (the links below go to the pages where the feeds come from, not the feeds themselves):

• two del.icio.us feeds, one for my own page and one for the balsamiq tag, in case someone uses it.
• a feed to my own blog, to see what it looks like to other subscribers in a feed reader.
• a feed for my blog’s comments, so that I am alerted whenever anyone leaves a comment.
• a feed for a google blog search for the word balsamiq, so that I know when anyone writes about me in their blog
• a feed for a google blog search for link:www.balsamiq.com, so that I know when anyone links to my site on their blog.
• a feed for a google news search for the word balsamiq, so that I know when any news organization writes about me
• a feed from Campaign Monitor that alerts me whenever anyone subscribes to my newsletter
• two feeds from GetSatisfaction, one for “all topics” and one for “recent replies”
• a feed from Tweetscan that alerts me whenever anyone uses the word “balsamiq” in Twitter, and a similar feed from Summize
• a feed from my own twitter account, to see what it looks like to my followers in a reader
• a feed from Facebook about my notifications there.
• a feed from my public bugbase which alerts me if anyone files a new bug

So whenever someone writes about balsamiq or contacts one of balsamiq’s online persona’s pages, it shows up on my iGoogle home page within minutes.

This allows me to know how my brand/product is perceived and most importantly provide customer service within seconds, no matter how people decide to publish their opinion about my company (web sites, blogs, news articles, twitter or Facebook).

Anything else you can think of that I should be tracking via RSS?

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Search Engine Optimization? Check! :)

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 19th, 2008 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — No Comment

I am extremely happy to report that Balsamiq.com turns up as the coveted #2 spot for Google searches for “web office plugins”, which is exactly the space I am trying to play in.

This is remarkable considering I am not even officially launched yet and have barely any links pointing to my site. The beauty of picking a niche that’s just starting to form I guess…

I still don’t show up under “Confluence Plugin” or “JIRA Plugin” or “UI Mockup Software”, but there’s time for that.

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Balsamiq Mockups Online Help

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 18th, 2008 under Development / Technical, Mockups — No Comment

I just completed the first draft of the Balsamiq Mockups Online Help documentation.

These are my beliefs about software documentation in our current state of technology:

• software should be very simple and ideally require no documentation.
• online help should be sprinkled around the app, in context. Read this article for what I mean.
• very few people actually read the docs as if it was a book – note that this wasn’t true 10 years ago, I used to love reading printed manuals. I believe some people still do read it top-to-bottom, so it’s good to give some sort of narrative structure to your docs.
• people only go to help when they have a problem, so you need to make it easy for them to find a solution. In other words, help should be more of a FAQ than anything else. To support this, I think all help should be on one single HTML page, which is easy to print, turn to PDF and most importantly a “Find in this page…” command (CTRL+F) will be effective on it.
• a picture is worth 1000 words, especially when you’re trying to explain something, so add as many screenshots as you can.
• the docs should be a live document, always and continuously updated. That’s why I don’t embed the doc with the build but rather keep it in one location online. Also, FAQs should be incorporated in the docs over time.
• you should support deep-linking to a section of the docs. This allows you to just send a very direct link in a support situation without having your user have to scroll down 3 or 5 pages, they’re already confused as it is!
• the docs should not be one-way nor they should be an end-point. It’s likely that your users won’t find their answer in the docs, so give them an easy path to a place where they can find an answer (like the forums) or ask a question. I use GetSatisfaction for both, and point to it right at the top of the docs. And if that doesn’t work, I send them to the support page where they can email me or call me.
• finally, the tone. You don’t need to talk down to your users, they probably have been using a mouse and keyboard for years, and have dealt with harder software than yours (at least you should hope so!). Just imagine you’re explaining your software to a peer.
• Oh, and please oh please don’t have any typos or misspellings, that just looks terrible.

Ok, after that last one I’d better go read it over again.

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Mockups didn’t make the cut, oh well

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 17th, 2008 under Branding / Marketing, Development / Technical, Mockups — No Comment

So back in February I ran into this call for entry for the “Application Design Annual: Year’s 10 Best UIs” and decided to apply, as a free marketing channel and also because I was hoping to get some good feedback from the usability gurus at the Nielsen Norman Group.

I thought that presenting usability experts with an app that helps developers improve their software’s usability was going to be a slam dunk, but alas, a month or so ago I heard the sad news that my app didn’t make the top 10 this year. Oh well, I’ll try again next year, when the app will be launched and have customers.

The main reason for this post is to share my submission entry, in case anyone is interested in seeing what a NON-winning submission looks like.

What do you think I could have done better?

[UPDATE: the winners were just announced today - good apps. I may try again next year.]

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Wow that was hard

by Peldi Guilizzoni. May 10th, 2008 under Company / Business, Development / Technical, Mockups — No Comment

Sorry for not sending out updates for soe long, but it’s been quite a hard and busy time since then. My family and I relocated from San Francisco to Bologna, Italy on May 1st, so we had to sell most of our belongings, donate a bunch more and throw away a bunch more, then pack the rest into a big crate (now on a boat on its way here, very slowly), clean up the house we left (it was a rental), pack 7 big pieces of luggage (3 of which were over maximum weight), fly here, and start over in a new house, which is partly furnished but definitely not as livable as what we had built over the years in our previous place. It took us about a week to get over jet-lag, and yesterday it was the first time I could sit down and work on Balsamiq for an hour or so.

Man, I am glad the last two weeks are behind me. There’s still an enormous amount of house-work ahead of us (we’re totally redoing the kitchen next month, and that’s just the start), but at least I am awake during the day now, which is nice. And in a week or two I might even have a chair for my desk! (what a luxury huh?)

So needless to say Balsamiq work has slowed to a crawl, which I really don’t like. I hate feeling unproductive and slow…I really really do.

Anyways, I have added a “tag cloud” control type to Mockups, fixed a few bugs here and there (groups are starting to be usable I think) and started working on the documentation. More users are also asking to buy the AIR version, which is tempting but I’m still on the fence about it. I’d be interested in your opinion on the subject here.

I expect this week to still be mostly house-work again, but I hope to be able to carve out more and more time to work as time goes on. Even having 4 uninterrupted hours a day would be huge, but right now
that seems like a dream. Wish me luck!

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