[calinet6]

I recently evaluated mockup apps (from Balsamiq to Moqups to Mockingbird to Axure) for a new project of ours, and nothing I found gave me what I needed—which was the ability to mock up interactivity in a predictable, easy, and non-tedious way.

I made my own library instead to simply control state in an HTML page using simple, logical class names and IDs. This, combined with Bootstrap, made an HTML mockup a very fast and easy way to do exactly what we needed.

Is there some new feature in Moqups that helps with interactive state such as this? Or do you have any suggestions on what the "best practice" for interactive UI mockups should be?

Or is this something people don't usually do? Is it seen as "too realistic" or unuseful? So far we've found the interactive mockup invaluable in honing generic UIs and determining which direction to go, so I can't believe it's so difficult in most tools to control and easily switch component states.

[bobwaycott]

Well, I use the Link feature with a button in the prior version to link to other pages. This is now consolidated into the revamped hotspot feature.

I've used this on a single project so far to show off interactivity by creating a mockup, duplicating it, adding in the interactivity changes (say, a popup or other state changes), and then create a button to link off to the duplicated page with the extras. It made for a pretty nice mockup with demo-ability.

The current version has moved this into the hotspot feature, which appears to allow arbitrary hotspot creation and the same ability to link to other mockup pages. There is now no need for a button as far as I can tell.

[calinet6]

Cool, that is an improvement.

Does this allow for incremental refinement/iteration of the mockup? My problem with duplicating pages is basically having a bunch of shared components on the same page, and then having to make a change to one of them... across the dozen different pages representing the states... so it was still an insufficient method for me.

[bobwaycott]

Yeah, there's not exactly a perfect way of getting it just right, as far as I see it. I tended in my projects to use the tooltip object to highlight/explain certain interactive pieces. But I don't use tools like this to actually dig into interaction specifics--I use it to communicate the general direction of an idea only.

[moqups]

Master Pages might help here. We're also planning to add Master Objects to make this even easier.

[moqups]

We're looking at elegant but simple ways of adding support for other states (hover, double click and so on).