The latest news from Balsamiq:
A summary of the topics we covered with Wireframing Academy webinars so far.

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Hi! Billy from the Education Team here. We are using this newsletter to make you aware that our team has begun hosting webinars focused on wireframing and user experience design. Cue the fireworks!

In typical Balsamiq fashion, we started slow, hosting 4 in one year, but we plan to ramp up the frequency. We’re not webinar experts so we wanted to take time to find our groove. We started quarterly as a way for us to test out the waters and learn as we went. Now, we’re ready to dive in and create more and we're excited about tell you all about it.

Why did we start hosting webinars?

Webinars are a great way to share knowledge with the world while being able to answer questions from the audience in real-time. It allows us to connect more deeply with the people we're writing for on Balsamiq Wireframing Academy (BWA).

They are also a great way to dive deeper into the articles we write and bring them to life. Explaining the examples we’ve used in more detail or even demonstrating the tips and tricks we mention, in real-time, helps you “get it” even more. Design is a visual medium and some folks learn best by demonstration. Webinars allow us to do that.

Finally, with the rise of everything being online because of the pandemic, it was a great time for us to get comfortable with virtual presentations.

A quick note about privacy: some companies use webinars as a way to harvest email addresses as “leads”. Yuck, that is not how we work! 🙂 We delete all registered emails right after we send out the recording link.

Let’s recap our webinar topics so far

How to Design Effective Data Tables with Wireframes

We kicked-off our webinars with the complex topic of designing data-heavy applications, more specifically, data tables based on our article Designing Effective Data Tables. Data tables resemble an Excel file and are a prominent feature of many business-to-business (B2B) applications — software typically used internally at your own organization — and are often ignored when applying basic UI design principles.

Making them easy to read and understand is a big challenge for designers of all levels. In this webinar we discussed common design pitfalls and presented tips and tricks for overcoming them. At the end we demonstrated ways to improve data table design and offered up alternative options for presenting data heavy content.

Go to the Webinar: How to Design Effective Data Tables with Wireframes

User Experience Design as a Career

In our next webinar we covered a topic that was a source of many questions posed to us throughout the years. What is the day-to-day of a UX Designer? Being a professional designer is a sought after career and there are many folks interested, but aren't sure what they do exactly, … just ask my mom 🙂.

This webinar was based off of our work on a resource page on BWA, Advice for Getting Started in UX Design and explained what UX as a career looks like, the different types of roles that fit under the UX career umbrella, how people from every type of background can become one, and ways you can too.

Go to the Webinar: User Experience as a Career

Content-first Design with Wireframes

We followed that up with a topic our team feels very passionate about, that any digital design project should start by focusing on the content first, based on the article Content-First Design: Let the Content Determine the Design. The point we make is that you shouldn’t determine the visual design before you know what content will be the most effective for your particular project.

For the webinar, we weaved together clips of interviews from our Process Behind series to explain how professional content designers approach their projects and how you can too. At the end we walked through a few examples of content-first processes and demonstrated how you can use them with your wireframes.

Go to the Webinar: Content-first Design with Wireframes

How to Use Wireframes with Agile User Stories

Our most recent webinar was based on the article Using Wireframes with Agile User Stories. It’s a topic that’s top-of-mind for many developers and product managers. We walked through how wireframes can be paired with user stories to help designers balance the piecemeal nature of Agile development.

The visual nature of wireframes helps to remove each person's subjective interpretation of the request, and the user story format can be adapted while preserving the spirit of Agile. We showed how you end up with better communication between teams and better products for your users.

Go to the Webinar: How to Use Wireframes With Agile User Stories

Up next

Our next webinar topic is based on the article Copying an Existing UI to Learn How It Was Designed. Copying as a form of learning has been used for millennia. Think of the study of the old masters in the fine arts. Think tradespeople teaching their craft to their apprentices.

Copying is a great way to become truly intimate with an app, or software application, and learn how and maybe even why it was designed the way it was. It’s a fantastic way to quickly ramp up your UI skills!

Register for the webinar

Product news

We pushed out a nice little release, with a bunch of bug fixes, 1 new feature, and we even managed to kill 3 no-longer-used little features! 🙂

The new feature is a redesign of our “Export” options. It’s now more streamlined: We managed to make it both easier to use and more powerful at the same time! 🙂 More work is happening in this area, so stay tuned.

The 3 features we removed are the “Project Members Chat” in Balsamiq Cloud (no-one was using it, and async work is better anyways), the onboarding pop-ups which were slowing new users down, and the Export/Import JSON dialogs (everything can be done with copy/paste instead).

January is also a good month for chores: we review our AWS spending, pay some technical debt, and do some fun behind-the-scenes engineering work.

Wireframing Academy news

We published 2 new articles by copywriter Chris Silvestri: Wireframing Website Copy for Product People and How to Wireframe Your Website Copy. A Step-by-Step Guide. These are expanded versions of what Chris wrote in our newsletter last September.

We also wrote a summary of the interviews that we’ve been doing with designers and makers in our in-depth “The Process Behind” series. It’s a great way to get an overview of each video in one place.

Lastly, we uploaded 10 new templates to our Wireframes To Go site based off of the most popular apps and sites, such as Twitter, Zillow, GrubHub, TikTok, Spotify, and Amazon. These can be a really helpful way to design new products by following proven existing patterns. You can find them all in the Templates category of Wireframes To Go.

UX/UI links for February

Building Like It's 1984: A Comprehensive Guide to Creating Intuitive Context Menus — by Michael Villar
Inclusion First: How to Make Your Product Accessible and Inclusive — by Mandy Cornwell
UX Designers and Content Designers: A Framework for Collaboration — by Jan Rojcek
How to Create a UX-Vision Statement — by Kate Kaplan
Swiping vs Tapping, What is Less Distracting to Drivers? — by Casper Kessels

Company news

We recently published an article for the Startup Grind community on How to Use Sponsorships to Increase Diversity in the Workplace, another on the frisbee teams we sponsor, and our founder Peldi was a guest on the Bootstrapped podcast again.

Help us make Balsamiq Better! We donated $2.400 to the Italian charity Copaps, thanks to all the participants of our 2021 research efforts. We also picked 2 charities for 2022. Want to help? Schedule a call with Jess and tell us how we can improve Balsamiq for you.

Sponsorships and raffles: Notable events we sponsored this month are DeafIT, The Face of a Founder, Interaction 22, and more!

Notable recipients of our Free Software Program:

The College Diabetes Network is focused on providing young adults with T1D with the resources they need as they transition to independence at college and beyond.
The Corolla Wild Horse Fund protects, conserves, and responsibly manages the herd of wild Colonial Spanish Mustangs in North Carolina.
The National Domestic Workers Alliance works to win respect, recognition, and labor rights and protections for the more than 2.5 million domestic workers in the US.

That's it for this month!

I hope you enjoyed catching up with us. As our inner circle, we’d love to hear what types of content we can present for you in future webinars. Simply reply to this email and let us know!

See you next month, with more behind-the-scenes news from your friends at Balsamiq!

Billy for the Balsamiq Team

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A New Way to Learn How to Wireframe: Balsamiq’s Webinars

Why did we start hosting webinars?

Let’s recap our webinar topics so far

How to Design Effective Data Tables with Wireframes

User Experience Design as a Career

Content-first Design with Wireframes

How to Use Wireframes with Agile User Stories

Up next

Product news

Wireframing Academy news

UX/UI links for February

Company news

That's it for this month!

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