Mockups, what is it good for?

Some people like to think in terms of text and others prefer diagrams or drawings. I am a huge fan of drawings. But I prefer drawings that do not draw too much attention to details that are not important in the context. When looking through some old favourite blogs I found this post about the level of detail in a demo. Its a great summary of what not to do when you want to show ideas and get creative feedback.

And guess what? I've been in a discussion with someone about this before. In the discussion someone mentioned a tool that gave you the possibility to make mockups fairly quick with a look of a sketch. I've now tested and even bought the tool for my self to use at work when making backlog elements for further specification. Since my drawing skills are rather lacking the tool helps me to make some really nice sketches. The tool (Balsamiq) is really easy to learn and I use less than 5 minutes on the sketch below.

The level of detail enables us to communicate on the content instead of the details of the dialog window like colors and text size.

And as Kathy mentioned at CPU; it does not give the customer the idea that we are almost done with implementing it, because it looks almost finished on the openoffice slide!

This is because the details that really doesn't matter right now is not there. I would go as far as to say that this is good enough for specification purposes in most cases. It will get changed later in the development iteration anyway, when the customer sees the real screen during development he will then ask for new or altered functionality. The important part here is that this sketch often contains enough information to start developing the desired functionality. This removes the waste of making too much spesification. And did I say that this sketch is so much easier to change than a photoshop picture?