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Moqups Premium

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Re: Moqups Premium

#11

Post by 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.

Re: Moqups Premium

#12

Post by cristianpascu »

calinet6 wrote: post #9
cristianpascu wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the other day I paid $20 for a pen. You know, half the 'pen and paper' alternative.

Hey, I love nice fountain pens more than anyone, but you can get a good pencil and paper pad for a couple bucks.

That's true. I wanted this specific pen for its quality.

My point actually was that it's pretty much non-sense to complain about a free tool. You probably did the right thing, as a developer, you built your own system.

Re: Moqups Premium

#13

Post by mtrimpe »

Finally! These guys rock.

I prototyped our startup's entire user flow with Moqups and I couldn't be happier ... their way of configuring elements from a plain textfield with a Markdown-inspired philosophy works really well for me.

I literally asked them when I would finally be able to pay them for privacy controls a while ago ... they haven't mailed me yet though ;)

Re: Moqups Premium

#14

Post by moqups »

mattmanser wrote: post #4

Hmm, this is a really great product and I've loved using it, but 2 projects? That's so ridiculously low that 'free forever' seems a bit hollow and vacuous now. It would be better if you just came out and said it. Are you just supposed to go one humungo project now? I'm certainly not paying a monthly recurring fee for a mock up tool to play with side projects! I could see upgrading it for the collaboration aspect for…

Thanks a lot for the candid feedback!

It took us a while (and more than 60,000 free users!) to better understand our business metrics and see what our opportunities are until we've made these not always easy decisions. We also had a look at what our competing products are offering and many times it's nothing more than a free, very limited trial.

Let me try to shed some more light about the free version: - We've tried to avoid disabling common sense functionality just for forcing users to upgrade. Unlimited saving, unlimited exporting, unlimited pages and so on. Keep in mind that all mockups are throwaway artifacts that one can simply export and then safely delete their projects. It's a little inconvenient but it's not a finite resource that users can't replenish like in a case of a time limited trial. The premium features are typically wanted by business users who like a little more granular privacy settings, run multiple projects through their many customers or prospects or have extremely big projects that can benefit from productivity features like master pages. The premium users even avoid using our service for free if they don't have some confidence that someone is running a sustainable and trustworthy business in behind.

- There is no data loss when you downgrade from a premium plan. The only thing we do is gracefully disable some premium functionality and restrict editing (not viewing) to projects created in the premium period.

- All the users who signed up before got to keep their projects and the editing capabilities. Some of them have more than 150 huge projects.

- On top of this, we are giving non profit and educational organizations as well as open source teams free premium plans.

- We rarely say no to users asking for discounts or extended trials if they can't afford the premium plans.

Our most important goal for us is to create a business we can grow so we can bring more value for our users - we really have a ton of great features in the pipeline that we're excited about.

Time will tell whether we've made the right steps or if we have to make certain adjustments to our business.

Thanks again!

Edit: line breaks

Re: Moqups Premium

#15

Post by bobwaycott »

calinet6 wrote: post #11

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…

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.

Re: Moqups Premium

#16

Post by moqups »

nateweiss wrote: post #5

This is a totally trivial nitpick, but when I see 500MB at the $9 level I start to do multiplication in my head and kind of get distracted. If it wouldn't cost you too much more, I would suggest considering 1GB for that level. The little story told by the levels just seems simpler that way to me. Like I said, totally minor point, and perhaps it's just me so take with a lot of salt. Congratulations getting to this sta…

Thank you - you have a very valid point with the image limitations so we'll reconsider.

We're also planning many more integrations and Basecamp is close our radar. We're seeing huge amounts of traffic coming from tools like Aptana, Trello or Basecamp so this makes a lot of sense.

Stay tuned!

Re: Moqups Premium

#17

Post by moqups »

mtrimpe wrote: post #13

Finally! These guys rock. I prototyped our startup's entire user flow with Moqups and I couldn't be happier ... their way of configuring elements from a plain textfield with a Markdown-inspired philosophy works really well for me. I literally asked them when I would finally be able to pay them for privacy controls a while ago ... they haven't mailed me yet though ;)

We're very happy to hear this. Our newsletter is in the works - we've been quite swamped by the launch :)

Re: Moqups Premium

#18

Post by moqups »

bobwaycott wrote: post #15
calinet6 wrote: post #11

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…

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…

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

Re: Moqups Premium

#19

Post by calinet6 »

bobwaycott wrote: post #15
calinet6 wrote: post #11

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…

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…

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.

Re: Moqups Premium

#20

Post by mtrimpe »

moqups wrote: post #16
nateweiss wrote: post #5

This is a totally trivial nitpick, but when I see 500MB at the $9 level I start to do multiplication in my head and kind of get distracted. If it wouldn't cost you too much more, I would suggest considering 1GB for that level. The little story told by the levels just seems simpler that way to me. Like I said, totally minor point, and perhaps it's just me so take with a lot of salt. Congratulations getting to this sta…

Thank you - you have a very valid point with the image limitations so we'll reconsider. We're also planning many more integrations and Basecamp is close our radar. We're seeing huge amounts of traffic coming from tools like Aptana, Trello or Basecamp so this makes a lot of sense. Stay tuned!

Looking forward to it. Great work on the responsiveness of large projects by the way! It runs much smoother now than it used.
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