A little over a month ago, Mike Gunderloy wrote a review of Mockup Screens. The timing was perfect because I was near the point of laying out the user interface and business logic for a module in a back office ASP.NET project. Over a year ago, I had written specifications for Purchasing and Item Inventory modules. At that time, one of the complaints from the customer contact was that they couldn't see the screens.
I didn't give them screenshots because I hadn't wanted to take the time to mock them up in Visual Studio. It seemed too tedious to mess with the markup, make sure it rendered properly in the browser, and then take screenshots. So I relied upon a text-only specification. Convenient for me but not for the customer.
Upon reading Mike's review of Mockup Screens, I was excited because it gave me the chance to quickly throw together a black and white, wireframe prototype of the screen. No markup, no muss, no fuss. Instead of having to take screenshots, it would save a GIF or JPEG of the screen to the directory of my choosing and I could insert it into the specification.
Following is an example of what a screen looks like:
Not pretty is it. But that's the point. I don't want pretty. I want to quickly put together something that gives my customer an idea of what they can do with the user interface. For me, that's the value in Mockup Screens. Another aspect is that it's scenario- based. You can assemble a sequence of forms illustrating how a user would walk through a particular screen, complete with annotations to point out specific behavior.
But Mockup Screens is not without its rough edges. For a version 2 product, it doesn't do some things that I've come to expect in a program. For example, it doesn't give me a Most Recently Used menu to re-open past projects. It doesn't remember where I last saved a screenshot. And it doesn't remember my options from one session to the next. These things are minor but it irritated me because I'm spending time on stuff I don't need to do.
The author, Igor Ješe, was quite responsive as I reported these issues to him. He's responded positively to these issues and I'm hoping to see them addressed in updates later this year.
Despite the quirks, this utility gave me the benefits I sought. It helped me do a better job at helping my customer understand what they're going to get.
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Sean Winstead