I’m really behind the times here, but in the last few weeks I’ve been playing around with a great little product called Balsamiq Mockups. It’s dead simple, and allows you to quickly and easily create… well… mockups, be that for your user interfaces or your web pages or whatever it is that needs designing. I’m currently using this to sketch out what kind of content we want on the new Proclamation Trust website before we let some designers work on the look and feel. Doing mockups like this is a great way to help everybody on the team understand what I’m up to and to give their input, even the totally non-technical ones.

Balsamiq comes with a great big palette of common UI elements, and then you just drag and drop them as you want. It all has a pleasing hand-draw feel to it, which helps remind everybody that this is just a mockup, not the real thing (you just know how managers love to assume you’re nearly finished once they see an authentic-looking UI screenshot!)

Best of all, the team at Balsamiq are mad about customer service: they respond to support requests quick as a flash and are obscenely generous!

You can try it for free online, and if you haven’t yet taken it for a spin then I highly recommend you do!