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Justinmind Prototyper Review by Simon Bestbier | 04 May 2010 | 2 Comments

Here at Realmdigital we have realised that good documentation and good wire-frames can make or break a project and even possibly a client relationship.

Although those hours of writing out functional specification documents (which most definitely should be billable) and preparing wire-frames may seem tedious, the age old proverb of a stitch in time, saving nine always holds true.

At the beginning of last week, I was contacted by a company based in Spain which have developed an offline wire-framing application called Justinmind Prototyper, and they were keen for me to write up a review.

Although my initial thoughts were...ah, ANOTHER wire-framing application, I was impressed at the maturity of the product and surprised by the fact that I had not come across their tool earlier.

I currently use a application called Axure RP for all my wireframing and I believe Axure RP is currently considered the best in the industry. This may be until now...

Why I love Axure RP...

Before I begin the review let me list the features I really appreciate in Axure as these would be the primary features I would use to compare the two products.

Ease of Use:

Axure's simple drag and drop system allowed the creation of simple to extremely complex wireframes quickly and easily. Since I generally dread spending hours working on any documentation, this is important to me.

Help / Documentation / Support:

Axure ensure their users have all that's required to make using their tool a pleasant overall experience. On the few occasions that I did direct a mail to their support team, my request was dealt with quickly and efficiently.

Document Generation:

This functionality I definitely don't use enough however I have seen how powerful if can be in my early days of using Axure. The Axure document generation functionality lets the user generate prototype and specification documents on their own document templates.

This tool is extremely powerful as it cuts out a huge step in the process having to no longer create a document for your client to sign of before going ahead with development.

All in all I have enjoyed working with Axure and have not found any of the provided functionality lacking although I did find certain more advanced feature slightly difficult to master (insanely confusing) such as setting up the documentation template.

That said, let us take a look at Justinmind Prototyper and see what these guys have been able to deliver.

Introducing Justinmind Prototyper

Installation

I found the Justinmind install process extremely and the entire installation process was handled by the installation wizard. The terms and conditions held nothing unusual.

First Impressions

On opening Justinmind for the first time, I was struck by the clean layout and similarity to Axure. Justinmind has a host of widgets, more than Axure, and the widgets are more flexible than those present in Axure.

Justinmind have also put thought into the design of their widgets to take as much of the unnecessary work away from the user. An example of this is the Rich Text widget is already populated with Lorem Ipsum, saving the user from having to drop in a widget only to then have to populate it with dummy content.

This thought goes into each and every widget with some gems such as the File Upload widget (with a working browse for file button) and pagination widget (saving you having to create a pagination element each time you create a listing page).

The similarities to Axure are close but Justinmind definitely has a more modern feel to it with more care going into their widget design. Justinmind also allows you to see a prototype much quicker without having to go through the clunky "generating prototype" seen in Axure.

Documentation

Justinmind really comes into its strength with documentation and I believe it will be in this arena that Axure is blown away.

Justinmind not only allows for wire-frame and specification documents to be generated but also for scenarios to be created in much the same fashion as you would create wire-frames...dragging and dropping scenario components.

I have not yet had a chance to play with the documentation functionality yet but watch this space for my review.

Conclusion

As much as I love Axure, Justinmind is a serious contender and the have without a doubt nailed down certain area's of functionality better than Axure.

Without having used Justinmind on an actual project wire-frame yet, I have been unable to uncover some of its real strengths (or weaknesses) but the team at Justinmind have promised me a licence for this purpose and I promise to post a more comprehensive review based on this.

I would definitely suggest giving it a look though.