Sunday 6 March 2011

SharePoint 2010 Balsamiq Wireframes

Working as a SharePoint Consultant you don't always have benefit of a dedicated UX consultant.  If you are working using an agile method such as scrum you may find that you quickly need to sketch wireframes with the product owner or team to communicate the requirements and user stories.

Wireframes are a low-fi representation of a webpage. They need to be medium detail design which gives enough information the end user to relate to and the designer to understand while still allowing his creative skills to be put to good use.

I love the use of white boards when in workshops but sometimes you don't have the benefit of these so software is another option.  I found that the Visio SharePoint Templates, although accomplished, didn't give the same impact as using lo-fi Balsamiq versions.

Balsamiq has a number of build in components which allow for quick development of UX concepts, I've created a few more elements created for a project I worked on recently:
  • Standard Homepage / Master
  • SharePoint 2010 Ribbon 
  • Views / Data Grids
  • Taxonomy Browser
  • Visio Services Process Viewer
  • Standard Search
  • FAST Search
  • Task Dialog
  • Social Tagging
  • Social Notes
  • Presence Indicator
  • Presence Popup
  • Tag Could
The current version of Wireframes for Sharepoint 2010 in PDF
Here are the Balsamiq Source Files