The latest news from Balsamiq:
How our customers' voices drive our product decisions

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If you’ve ever wondered
“Will Balsamiq consider my request?”
The answer is +1

Turning a request into a feature

We love to talk about how our features are “customer-driven”, but sometimes it’s difficult to give a concrete example of that. Often, features will be amalgamations of customer requests and our own ideas - you can see the customer in them, but they don’t map 1:1 with the actual request. Luckily, we just released the highly-requested Image Links feature in Balsamiq Cloud, which is identical to the request that originally came in for it, and a really good example of how a request becomes a feature. Because of that, we’d love to walk you, our inner circle, through our process of turning a customer’s request into a feature. The process, as you might expect, is a long one, and touches almost every team.

Communicating the need

Every feature starts with a need. It doesn’t matter if it’s ours or a customer’s, necessity is the mother of invention. In the case of image links, it was a need that we were meeting in myBalsamiq (our vintage web-app), but weren’t meeting in Balsamiq Cloud.

Without getting too into the weeds, we didn’t include image links in Balsamiq Cloud was because the structure and engineering of the app were completely different than that of myBalsamiq. Forgetting the fact that myBalsamiq was 5 years old at that point, and based on design ideas that were older than that, the idea of hosting a plain PNG of your wireframe seemed so…static. Wouldn’t it be much cooler if we allowed you to interact with (and comment on) the actual wireframe? A PNG feels empty and seems like a relic from the previous age of wireframing.

But the requests kept coming in. The people wanted their PNGs.

Quantifying the need

Whenever a customer requests a change or feature, we write a story for it in Pivotal Tracker, which we use for bug and feature tracking. Once a request makes it into Pivotal, we +1 whenever it comes up again to keep track of demand. We have an internal tool that counts every story’s +1 and ranks them based on that number, which gives us a zoomed-out view of what people are looking for.

What’s great about the vote tracking is that, after a while, it becomes very obvious what feature we need to work on next. Image Links, no matter how much we tried to ignore it internally, was quickly becoming the number one request for Balsamiq Cloud. It wasn’t just a “nice to have” either, it was a need. Companies were holding off migrating from myBalsamiq to Balsamiq Cloud because they needed image links. We knew we had to do something. So we started brainstorming…

Brainstorming the need

The first thing we do is set up a brainstorming page. Because we are a remote company spread across 3 main timezones, we mainly use Confluence for collaboration.

We had another idea for sharing wireframes (an embeddable viewer) that we knew would take a while to implement, so we kicked off the Image Links project by focusing on brainstorming a quick and easy stopgap - something that would work for our customers, but also wouldn’t take too much time. We didn’t want to spend a ton of time on a feature we would end up replacing later.

We chatted and brainstormed for several weeks, but eventually decided that a quick, easy, and secure implementation was not in the cards for us. We could pick one of those (quick, easy, or secure), but not all three, and Image Links needed all three.

Implementing the need

A feature like Image Links can be difficult for us for two reasons. First, we are a small team, and our dev resources are limited, and second, Image Links was a pretty complex feature to actually code, so it was going to be a lot of work. Throw our soon-to-be-released Desktop update into the mix, and you have a dev timeline with a long tail.

One policy we stick to 100% when developing a feature is that we never give customers a firm timetable of when it will be done. We focus on pace, not deadlines, and while this can be frustrating for customers, it brings about the best results - both for them and for us. If we had started giving out date estimates when we started, we would have missed half a dozen of them. More than a year past between the initial exploratory project, and Image Links' release.

The expanded project started in November of 2019, and image links were finally released in June of 2020. It took four months before image links were ready to test; and another three months before they were ready for release. It touched all of our dev teams (Cloud, Editor, and Integrations), User Research, Design, Docs, and Support. Like any good feature, it was a company-wide effort.

And now they’re available, they’re awesome, and our users couldn’t be happier with them. It felt good to finally turn that request into a feature.

Tell us about your needs

Being customer-driven means the voice of our users is heard beyond support calls. Customers' ideas propagate through our whole company, and they shape it.

We were reluctant to move up Image Links in our priority list. But, we knew each +1 represented a large number of you who were telling us the right thing to do.

Feedback and questions; bug reports and requests are the ultimate driving force of products. We’ve known this since day one. So, if you have a problem or a question, we want to know! We’re present on many different channels to make it convenient for you to reach us.

Quantifying the need (now with fast-acting user research!)

For the past two years, we’ve been learning how to do User Research so we can amplify your signals. In User Research we have one more channel meant to increase the power of what customers have to say.

User Research brings us closer to a deeper understanding of who our users are and how we should transform Balsamiq to have a positive impact on their everyday lives.

If you want to help us make Balsamiq better for you and everyone else, just sign up below, or book a call. We’re so ready to hear all those ideas.

I want to make Balsamiq better

What happened at Balsamiq in July

We released version 4.1 of Balsamiq Wireframes for Desktop, which includes a new version of the Balsamiq Sans font, and the long-requested “automatic check for updates” feature. Check it out!

We shifted a lot of our sponsoring efforts to online events, revamped the Learning Resources section of the Balsamiq Wireframing Academy, and published an in-depth blog post titled How We Planned a Virtual Retreat During the Covid-19 Crisis.

As always, we slow down a little during the summer, to take some vacation and recharge our batteries.

UX/UI links for July

UX for Search 101
“Despite looking like a simple feature, the Best First pattern can be a defining element of user experience.”
-Gabriela Gentile

How Nondesigners Contribute to Designing the Right Things
“Nondesigners have the power and the responsibility to formulate amazing problems to solve and define appropriate requirements that can potentially result in a successful product.”
-Jacopo Cargnel

Designing for how much users care
“When a client asks you to design a landing page to ‘educate users’ or to ‘make them sign up to <thing>’ you absolutely need to start asking questions.”
-H Locke

Design Docs at Google
“Subscribing to agile methodologies is not an excuse for not taking the time to get solutions to actually known problems right.”
-Malte Ubl

Building Narrative into Your User Interface, Part 1
“UX designers can leverage many of the techniques that the literary world uses to create great reader experiences in creating great user experiences.”
-Jonathan Walter

That's it for this month!

Prioritizing features is a hard balancing act. We’re continuously learning how to do a good job keeping our customers at the core.

So we’re curious, how do you incorporate customer feedback into your products? We’d love to know.

Thanks for reading, see you next month!