[RickS]

Sketch is my personal favorite. Balsamiq can work and is commonly recommended, but IMO turn off the "hand drawn" effects. They're great for demoing rough things to clients in a way that says "this isn't final", but if you're actually trying to lay out a page at 100% resolution they're going to give you a wildly wrong sense of what things are what size.

[bigtunacan]

I see Sketch put out there a lot for this and this is probably just my lack of knowledge (full disclaimer - not a UX designer), but I just have never understood how people are using Sketch for this?

My understanding of Sketch is that it is an alternative to Photoshop for hi-fidelity designs.

I don't understand is how are people using Sketch as an efficient wireframing tool in the early prototype phase as an alternative to something like Axure or Balsamiq?

[RickS]

Sketch is less like photoshop and more like illustrator, with all the non-UI stuff shaved off.

Sketch doesn't do nearly any of the advanced photo retouching stuff. It's mostly vector, mostly shapes. As flat UI gets more popular, sketch can increasingly do all the lifting on a hi-fi design, but depending on how crazy you get, photoshop is still king for that (anything involving texture, noise, pattern fills, etc has to be photoshop)

If you don't feel like learning a "real" workflow, balsamiq is quick because it comes with things like libraries of premade UI elements that you can just drop in without much of a learning curve.

If you're willing to learn sketch as a serious piece of software, it's very fast. Every design project I've worked on in the last 3 years or so has been 90% sketch. I drop back into photoshop for photo editing, or illustrator for advanced illustration (things with really complex paths or layer orders).

If you've got the interest, revisit sketch and try to put comparisons to photoshop out of your mind - sketch is UI first like photoshop is photo first, and it makes a big difference.

[bigtunacan]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll have to give the trial version a spin and give it more of a chance. I mostly use Balsamiq for mocking things up since it's fast, but often I would like something that doesn't look so rough.