Ask HN: Is there room for a Balsamiq competitor targeting iphone mockups? It seems like Balsamiq and mockingbird are pretty good for quickly prototyping ideas, but they aren't great at producing professional looking mockups, especially for the iphone / ipad. Is there room in the market for a competitor in this space? |
When you show a customer a mockup that is "just a sketch" (or looks like one) you can get their feedback on the layout and content.
When you give them a realistic looking mockup, the conversation can get bogged down in minutea like in "Can you make the background less blue? Maybe like Bob's shirt?" or "I don't like that font, can you...?" At which point you have to explain that it's only a mockup, not the actual product and politely try to steer them back to what you asked them in the first place.
Also, when they see a what looks like a finished product they think the work is mostly done which sets unreasonable expectations.
What if you could streamline the process and cover both the wireframing and mockup phases? The tool I'm thinking about building is very similar to other prototyping tools (like Balsamiq), but would basically take your wires and "upgrade them" to a more pro-looking mockup (after all, it's just a matter of switching out images).
http://support.balsamiq.com/customer/portal/articles/135659#...
You can get pretty nice results that are somewhat interactive on the device itself.
Seems like the market is really fragmented - everything from traditional photo/vector graphics software (photoshop, illustrator), traditional wireframing (omnigraffle, etc), online wireframing (balsamiq) and even presentation software (keynote and powerpoint!)
Keynotopia seems like a smart move for those who tend to lean to the presentation side of things - though I'd find it hard to believe that a designer who likes (or is used to) working in illustrator or photoshop would want to start using keynote!
http://screencast.com/t/tWUPNgGht2
The UI totally sucks and it isn't well designed at all. There's no sense of clickable screens, no sharing, no ipad, no retina, and no concept of a wire (only a mock). But the germ of the idea is there.
I'm thinking that a bunch of the iphone mockups that I've seen end up with the same shared components - toolbars, tab bars, status bars, etc. Those standard components are really the same objects, just in a more hi fidelity fashion.
Also, AFAIK with those tools, once you export, there is no way to keep the wires and mocks in sync, right?
I've experienced times in a consulting shop where both the mocks + wires are being iterated on simultaenously (mostly because the product guy would use omnigraffle where the designer would use photoshop) - leading to mocks + wires that just didn't jive with each other. This created confusion among the dev, design, and product teams about what specifically we were building, leading to increased time to market.