I'm really bad at doing neat pencil sketches and handwriting. Balsamiq easily lets be draw something up on my computer that looks obviously like it's "hand drawn style" and make is clear both to me while creating wireframes and to everyone else when I shard them that it's not intended to be high fidelity. I intentionally use Comic Sans to emphasize that.
If I were better with a pencil, I'd do these in a notepad or on graph paper - and then share phone camera photos of them.
F<or anyone who's ever died a little bit inside when their PM/boss say "Those wireframes are perfect. lets just hand those off to the devs!", I _highly_ recommend using whatever tooling or personal restrictions that workj for you - to generate output that is clearly "interface ideas" instead of being misinterpreted as "finished UI/UX designs".
> Balsamiq easily lets be draw something up on my computer that looks obviously like it's "hand drawn style" and make is clear both to me while creating wireframes and to everyone else when I shard them that it's not intended to be high fidelity.
I thought this was the core value proposition of Balsamiq.
In the same spirit as this from the late '90s: https://web.archive.org/web/20011102031149/http://www.mighty...
Using rough drawings is useful for user research. Users are less likely to criticize or suggest big changes if you present a polished design, even if it is just a mock up.
Esthetics are also an expression of functionality and maturity, better not be flippant about it.
- W11: emoving directory line tracing from File Explorer and nesting all file locations under "Desktop"
- Spotify: removing the iPod-style sub-locations for Artists, Albums, Playlists, etc. and instead showing them all as a continuous "library" where you filter for content based on buttons that reorder themselves and spill off the right side of the screen
- Google: constantly reordering the "images", "shopping" etc buttons depending on what it thinks you're most likely to click on
And it slows everything down! Every application seems to need to send telemetry back to the hosts. Spotify won't even render your "downloads" section in under 20 seconds if you're not connected to the Internet.
Not only is this modern UI field hell for actually experienced users (where are the function grids? Why is everything a two-color React card now?), I believe it's dumbing down non-technical users.
I sometimes send a picture of a well-ordered woodshop wall and a picture of a Tesla interior to sinternal company designers to ask them to stop turning every functional tool our internal ops people use into a point-and-click iPad program for toddlers. Give us the woodshop, not the white-seat-and-tablet view. Even that doesn't always work! I recently sent some devs an Excel mockup of a very tight, neat "task creation form" menu and they turned it into a disorganized nightmare of React fields with none of the visual justification and sorting enabled by the spreadsheet view. What is going on? Why are people allergic to functional UIs all of a sudden?
How often you had a formula like SUM(B1:B20), and then someone added item 21 and suddenly the output is just slightly wrong? Or perhaps someone updated the formula but did not propagate the change to the last few cells?
There are no error messages, no warnings, just an output which is slightly wrong. Wrong enough to break whatever it's going to be used for, but close enough that cursory inspection does not notice it. Basically the worst failure mode an app can have.
Spreadsheets _could_ be beautiful if no one were to use them for tabular data. But people do, so they are a really horrible programming language. I bet people spent thousands of years of their life fixing spreadsheet mistakes that could not have happened in any other language.
So, how is this different from engineers and MATLAB?
Spreadsheets (specifically Excel) are the most general-purpose end-user software I have ever seen. I saw people using it for art/painting. Someone used it for demonstrating graphics shaders and ray-tracing.
Blue cell is the current platforms end, green cells are easy places to jump to, yellow medium, red are hard.
Makes it very easy to adjust difficulty. Want hard mode harder? Reduce the amount of red squares to only the hardest jumps. Want it easier? Colour some of the yellows in red. Etc.
Having seen that, in 2015 I began working on a UI drafting software for that kind of technical designers. We ended up getting rid of the layout thinking overhead while drafting. They call it Content-First Design.
If you'd like to try it it's free: https://uxtly.com
Your "Driving Game" mockup got me thinking about indicating proportions on the drafts. I don't have a good answer to that, except that Cards can be resized in width. At any rate, to answer "perhaps it is slightly too high fidelity", I would say it's the opposite, too low since there's no layout design involved.
I'm aware it‘s confusing because Cards look like a mobile layout. I tried doing the pencil sketch style but it also gave the impression of a layout design tool.
I watch youtube too so it is not my connection I assume
https://uxtly.com/media/intro-PFXcRizx7hGieOVj96nDdBRNEDo.mp...
I draw my UIs on paper and just calculate the cells and merges, then code it. I'm a pen and paper addict when designing software (ideas, algorithms, UI).
It's not the fastest, but the most focused mode for me.
+-----+-------+
| | Lorem |
| |-------|
| | Ipsum |
| |-------|
| foo | Dolor |
| |-------|
| | Sit |
| |-------|
| | Amet |
+-----+-------+
What I do is, I draw the UI I imagine on a paper, add a grid where the smallest UI elements (labels, buttons, fields) their own, suitable $WIDTHx1 cells.
Some cells like "foo" needs to span mutliple cells (like this 1x5) to look and place correctly. At the end, you have a "spreadsheet like view" with some cells "merged and centered" in spreadsheet software parlance.
As the last step, I note the dimensions of the cells I need to realize the UI on the paper, and write the code reflecting that.
Note: not a fan of Balsamiq's current rent model... I bought a long time ago when it was < $100 for a regular license/download. Been a while since I used it.
Me too, which is a shame, since I've found nothing that beats it's simplicity and speed of idea-to-wireframe.
Really it’s just the spreadsheet method taken to its logical end.
A spreadsheet-like interface shows a lot of information, but it is not overwhelming because it stays fixed, so after using the software a couple of times you can remember where things are.