Balsamiq
If rapid wireframing is what you're looking for, then Balsamiq is a strong suggestion. You can quickly develop structure and layouts for your projects with ease. The drag-and-drop elements make life easier and you can link buttons to other pages. This means you can quickly start to plan your interfaces and then share them with your team or clients.
What is balsamiq wireframe?
Balsamiq Wireframes is a rapid wireframing tool that reproduces the experience of sketching on a whiteboard, but on a computer. ... Just add "Balsamiq Wireframes" and design your screens.
What is a wireframe mockup?
A mockup is a visual way of representing a product. While a wireframe mostly represents a product's structure, a mockup shows how the product is going to look like. But still, a mockup is not clickable (just like the wireframe). As opposed to awireframe, a mockup is either a mid or high-fidelity display of design.
What is UI mockup?
In manufacturing and design, a mockup, or mock-up, is a scale or full-size model of a design or device, used for teaching, demonstration, design evaluation, promotion, and other purposes. A mockup is a prototype if it provides at least part of the functionality of a system and enables testing of a design.
Pros
- Easy drag and drop of elements to convey any complex idea in minutes.
- It's really easy to use and the potential to be a great app is there.
- Ability to import images and use them on my wireframes and mock-up user interface designs.
- Super easy to use and it feels magical because in a matter of minutes you can build an entire UI mock
- Extremely fast layout creation that allows the user to bypass aesthetic worries in favor of simple interface models
- A comprehensive library of most major interface elements found in digital products today
- Impressive text-to-design entry feature that let’s users alter widgets via fast text entry
- Easy to use, even for non-professionals, potentially offering the chance to let business focused clients express their ideas and initial thoughts visually
- Low product cost
- Can help keep clients and users in the “this is just a preliminary design” frame of mind, which is great for early design phases
Cons
- Nothing springs to mind...
- Multiple displays organizations not supported in balsamiq.
- Android and ios specific components would be great to have.
- Editing of grids or adding rich text elements is a bit painful process
- Inability to create your own interface controls, which is a big obstacle if you are creating something outside of the mainstream
- Sketches will necessarily have to be recreated as more detailed wireframes / mockups in another application, as there is no real export functionality beyond the ability to save sketches as PNG files
- A minor nit here, but Mockups’ default background is an image of a spiral notebook. This only stays cute for a little while before I really want a plain white background