You've made it! Congratulations! Your hard work and dedication has paid off! You are now an expert Balsamiq user! Not feeling like an expert just yet? No worries. Just go back through the chapters and try all the exercises again. Feeling pretty confident? Great! It's time to take your skills to the next level.
To help you with that, I have provided some great resources for developing your creative skills and your creative thinking, not only as a wireframe designer, but also as a designer of the user experience. Remember, it's not just great visual design that makes an interface or product successful. Great design is also determined by how easy it is to navigate and how quickly and clearly the information presented can be understood and acted upon.
With the material covered in this book, you are well on your way to understanding these key concepts. By utilizing the following resources, you will be taking that knowledge to the next level, enabling you to provide not only your best solutions, but more importantly the right ones as well.
The following list shows what we will cover in this chapter:
- More about Balsamiq
- Third party extensions
- More about prototyping
- User experience design
Tip
All the links provided in this chapter can be found at my website: http://www.scottfaranello.com/experience/balsamiq-chapter-links
Who would better know about Balsamiq than the folks who created it, right? The Balsamiq website is a one-stop shop for all things Balsamiq, including a blog and community support system where real people actually respond!
Love Balsamiq? Hate Balsamiq? Want to see some improvements or perhaps a new feature? Let the folks at Balsamiq know about it. They are very responsive to requests and are most likely already working on it.
The Balsamiq blog is chock-full of posts by Balsamiq's own developers, http://www.balsamiq.com/blogs, as shown in the following screenshot:
Here, you will find posts on new releases, user experience issues, technical talk and more! You can also subscribe to their posts and follow them on Twitter, and so on. Overall, a great resource that I am sure you will use often. I certainly do.
While Balsamiq is easy to learn, you may still get stumped from time to time and need answers quickly. If so, be sure to check out Balsamiq's support pages at http://support.balsamiq.com/, as shown in the following screenshot:
As you can see, support offers articles, FAQs, documentation, tutorials and perhaps my favorite feature on the page…
Record a Screencast allows you to record both video and audio while addressing any issue you might be having within the application, as shown in the following screenshot:
Perform the following steps:
- Click on theRecord a Screenshot button to launch the screencast Java app.
It may take a few seconds or moments to load, depending on your machine and Internet speed.
- A screen capture frame will appear to hover on screen, complete with easy-to-follow directions.
- Navigate to the page you want to share with the support team and click on the record button, as shown in the following screenshot:
Wait for the countdown and remember to speak clearly and directly into the microphone if you plan to record your voice, along with your actions on screen.
- When finished, click on DONE, as shown in the following screenshot:
- View your captured video, fill out the form and upload it to the Balsamiq support team, as shown in the following screenshot:
- Click on Upload to submit your recording to the Balsamiq support team.
The other way to make contact is by clicking on the Ask the Community button, located just under the screencast button, as shown in the following screenshot:
Ask the Community is an online community of Balsamiq users talking about, what else, Balsamiq, as shown in the following screenshot:
As you can see, there are a number of things you can do here. It's all pretty easy to navigate so I will leave it to you to explore, but explore you must.
To start a new topic of conversation, click on the arrow to the right of the Community breadcrumb and select Topics in the drop-down menu that appears, as shown in the following screenshot:
Once there, click on the button Create a new topic , as shown in the following screenshot:
After that, the rest is up to you. Start a conversation, ask a question, share a tip, tell everyone about this book (had to sneak that one in there), post links to interesting articles about wireframing, whatever! Just try it. You'll like it.
I am going to defer to the folks at Balsamiq here, as they provide a very thorough and printable list of keyboard shortcuts. Sorry for the long URL, but I am sure you will find it worth your typing time:
http://www.balsamiq.com/files/community/balsamiq-keyboard-shortcuts.pdf.
Tip
As a reminder, all the links in this chapter can be found on my website http://www.scottfaranello.com/experience/balsamiq-chapter-links/