Every now and again I get to use an application that just works. Sometimes I feel compelled to tell others about it.
We had a product development workshop this weekend and one of our aims was to ensure that our target customers would be happy with the experience when they eventually use our application. To reach that goal, we’d invited a selection of our target customers to help shape the direction of the product.
These customers are users of a system that isn’t quite cutting it on a number of levels; one of which is the capture and re-presentation of data in an appropriate context. It’s important for us to get it right so we got them to walk us through screen flows, describing the data to be captured and also how it should be represented within different contexts.
In preparation, Andy had stumped up 79USD for a copy of Balsamiq Mockups and within a few minutes had our customers happily designing screens and flows. The LoFi sketch look and feel helped to keep a sense of things being changeable and our customers were quite happy to move controls and data fields around until they felt comfortable.
They went away feeling that they had contributed to designing a usable product and we went away knowing we had enough information to make a start on development. Hats off to the people at Balsamiq for producing such a cool application.