Hello and welcome back. Today I'll be giving you an example of another prototyping tool called Balsamiq. So the Balsamiq Mockup Tool is available at balsamiq.com and in fact will provide you with a license that you can use for the duration of this class. It's available for Windows, Mac, and you can also use it as a web app. Now, it provides a lot of the same advantages as prototyping on paper in that it takes a lot less time and you can get early feedback on your prototype. But it also has a few additional advantages, such as you don't need a person to be the Wizard of Oz. And you can actually export your prototypes into professional looking wireframes. One of the things that Balsamiq does on purpose is that it looks kind of sketchy. If you look at it, the text looks like it's written by hand, the lines looks not quite exactly straight as if they're sketched on a piece of paper. And that's on purpose so that when you show this prototype of a sketch to a user, they know that it's not quite done yet. But you want feedback that's formative rather than feedback about things like the color of the buttons. So, the general idea with Balsamiq is that you prototype your interface with drag and drop widgets and there's a quite a few available through Balsamiq. Then you link specific widgets and screens together through hotspots and then you watch a user try it out. So, let's actually demo this and see how it works. So, let's do a quick demo of the system. So, here I have Balsamiq open, and what I'm creating is a website that helps somebody who is in recovery from addiction or alcoholism help track their recovery and understand where they are. And maybe even get help if they need it. So this first page here is just the login page and I've gone ahead and created a link for the login button. There's other pages that I have started where somebody can actually see what their recovery looks like. There's a video meeting page and there's a settings page right now. So let's see what it looks like if want to just add a new element to this page. This is supposed to represent the video meeting so this is the person sharing and these are other people sharing their web cams. So this particular widget is called I believe web cam. So I can search for it here, and then just drag it in and resize it. So it's very, very easy to add a new element. You can also just copy, paste them the way you would anywhere. Now, the other thing that I haven't done here is that right now this tab is not actually linked to the video meeting page. So what I can go ahead is double click on it. And over here you see video meetings has no link right now. I titled my video meeting page video, so I can go ahead and select that link. So let's see what this actually looks like to a person who's trying it out. There's a play button over here, and so I'm going to go ahead and play it. So when a person is actually trying out your page, they will see this prototype that you've made. They can click on particular aspect of this. So let's say they enter their username and password then click log in. It takes them to the first part of the page. So here for example, they can see meetings they've recently attended, maybe how much time they've spend in meetings, maybe how many times they've called people. Also some information about their recovery, and they can also actually go through the tabs. So I've recently linked this video meeting tab to the video page, so if they click on it it'll actually go there. The settings tab will also direct them somewhere, etc. And you can also even select smaller widgets like somebody clicking on a particular check box, for example, and have that correspond to a specific task. So it's pretty straightforward to use this to create a prototype that looks like it's a sketch, but that a person can actually interact with. So, I hope that gives you the basic idea of how Balsamiq works. Now, final notes. Now, for this class you will have Balsamiq available but you don't really need this tool to create low fidelity prototypes. Paper, pens, pencils, scissors, all these tools that Hayi covered in her earlier lecture are really all the things you need. However, there are some nice features that Balsamiq adds and that's why we do cover it. You can also actually achieve similar results with PowerPoint if you already have PowerPoint. But Basalmiq does make it easier to create and manage links because it's kind of made for that purpose. And the sketchiness of Balsamiq is a really nice reminder to your users that you want feedback that's more formative and that's more about your idea than it is about specific kind of graphics or characterizations of your system. I also don't want you to think that Balsamiq is the only tool available for this purpose. There will be other tools available, newer tools for prototyping, and it's always nice to stay on top of that and see what else is available out there. But for now this may be a compelling tool for you to use. Thank you and I hope to see you in the next video.
