As a product manager creating quick click-prototypes with wireframes, I would like to create a series of show/hide actions, so that I can visualize interactions without having to duplicate the screen all the time.
Let me explain: In Powerpoint, you have the animations feature where you can put elements on the slide and show them after a click.
I wish I had something similar in Balsamiq. While creating static wireframes is a great start, I always create clickable prototypes, so that the people I share my ideas with have an understanding what using the product would feel like. This is more important to me than any UI/Layout questions.
Currently I solve this by duplicating the screen 5 times and then only change the element I want to interact with. I create symbols for everything around it so I can make changes more easily later. But it feels like a big workaround. Would be nice if Balsamiq could support this.
For now, creating interaction (or the appearance of interaction) in Balsamiq Wireframes, requires the flow youāre describing i.e. creating a ābeforeā wireframe and an āafterā wireframe which, when linked and navigated between, give the appearance of the interaction you need e.g. a dropdown menu appearing or such.
For now, itās the full extent of interaction weāre offering as weāre tightly focused on our vision of low-fidelity wireframing and early, rough-and-ready ideas around content and structure as opposed to, say, a more complex prototype offering a more finished, implementation-specific look along with realistic animation such as hover states, working controls, etc.
Itās quite deliberate and you can read some of the background of our thinking:
Note that second article is from 2011 and our basic approach to interaction (or lack of it) hasnāt changed in the more-than-a-decade since.
I think this is one feature request area where thereās unlikely to be much change in our thinking but, as with all requests, Iāve gone ahead and added your comments here to our tracking. Thank you.
I have found that certain elements could benefit from in-page āanimationā more than others.
For example:
Combo boxes
Menus
Being able to open a menu, show the options, click on an option and navigate to another page would really assist in the speed of creating a set of low-fidelity wireframes.
Consider a page with 5 combo boxes on it that you wish to show off all options in a walk through. At present this would require 6 separate pages with links to open and close the combo boxes.
A single page that could open those combo-boxes in the full screen demo would save a tremendous amount of time.
The negative is that the PDF export would not be able to show those combo-box contents. However, if Balsamiq is moving away from the desktop app, people will be viewing online in the app anyway and this may not be as important.