RE: GUI mockup software

[jimmy -at- breck-mckye -dot- com]

Margaret, I think you may have made a mistake. Azure is Microsoft's 
cloud hosting service. The tool you are thinking of is Axure, which does 
have a 30-day free trial but then costs about $300 per license (more if 
you want to use its spec generator and versioning control tools).

But back to the question.

There are a few options for creating interfaces, depending on how 
high-fidelity your specifications need to be. Balsamiq is cheap and has 
a shallow learning curve, but creates very lo-fi mockups, so it won't 
expose you to aesthetic or visual design issues. It is good for 
development stories, but I'd be wary of using it when designing a new 
product from scratch. For that, I would use something like Adobe 
Fireworks or even Photoshop for big projects.

I would not use 'compromises' like Excel or Visio; they simply aren't 
well adapted to the task at hand. Powerpoint provides some limited 
interactivity but there are better ways to document flows than 
interactive prototypes anyway.


On 2012-11-12 18:49, Margaret Cekis wrote: