Nowadays, designers sometimes spend so much time trying to get their work reviewed by clients and colleagues – whilst in progress – that they forget about the most important thing: the design. In the age of technology, there’s an app for overcoming almost every problem and making everything so much easier.
Mocksup is just one of those. It gives every designer the tools needed to share their designs with those who matter most, track progress and even more. Find out more after the fold.
Overview
Mocksup is a cool app that allows designers to have a place to store the latest mockups for their projects. It doesn’t matter if you’re an individual or a large team, Mocksup allows you to easily and efficiently manage mockups whilst tracking progress though the use of colleague feedback and progressive revisions.
Overview
All in all, this app is the perfect way to give you more time being creative and less distributing your work for team feedback.
Pricing
Mocksup offers both free and premium plans, with the free one limiting things such as storage space and the maximum number of projects, mockups and contributors. The paid plans are priced at either $9/month or $19/month depending on the very leniant caps on data required. The higher end plans would be recommended to design teams who have to handle a lot of projects and get real feedback while the mini plan would be either individuals or smaller teams who don’t require that much.
Pricing
User-Interface
The user-interface for Mocksup is not to be ignored. With a mix of both traditional and modern design elements, the app not only looks great but it feels great to use. There is never too much on screen and never too little. The simplicity of the app’s design means that a lot of the pointless explanations that are so often featured in other apps are taken out, and it therefore becomes less confusing to the user. Though the mockup manager feels a little inconsistent with the rest of the design, this is made up for by the quality of the app.
User Interface
Dashboard
Once you’ve registered for your account, you are immediately taken to the dashboard from which you can manage your projects. When you begin using the app, this will be empty but it can be soon filled up with your exciting creations. Once you’ve added a few, they will be accessible through this page. Though it doesn’t do much, the dashboard is your easy one-stop way to access all of your projects.
Dashboard
When you’re ready to begin work on a new mockup, simply make sure that you’ve got the mockup saved in a suitable standard image format and navigate to the project creation page to begin.
Mockups
Projects consist of one or more mockups that can be linked together to provide an easy way to navigate them. It’s easy to create projects and it’s even easier to upload mockups into the project – both can be done in a few seconds depending on the size of the assets.
Creating Projects
Adding Mockups
Once projects have been created and mockups added, they can be then edited in the editor. It’s possible to add a background image and further style the layout of your mockups, though the customisation is extremely limited. The app would be greatly improved if there were more features dedicated to enhancing the mockups themselves.
Mockup Editor
Links
Mocksup comes complete with a really cool feature that allows you to link several mockups together. This can be useful if your planned content has several pages that would be otherwise linked with HTML anchors. It simply becomes a case of, when previewing your mockup, clicking the link and you are taken to the linked mockup.
To create links between mockups, simply click the “Add a link” button if you’d like to add a new link, or there’s the option of importing links from another mockup. A situation that could be made easier with link importing would be when you have certain elements that are present on more than one mockup like in the case of a website, where the links for navigation items could be imported.
Moving Links
Versioning
One of the most appealing things about the app is its ability to control file versioning. When a new version of the mockup is created, it can easily be uploaded. This is a really nice way to track the progress of the project and review all of the important changes.
File Versions
There is, however, a limit on the maximum amount of storage available on the free and mini plans. Though this may not be much of a barrier if you rarely update your mockups, I would definitely recommend upgrading if you’re a hardcore designer and work on lots of projects.
Contributors
Finally, one of the most important elements of the app is the ability to add contributors for each project. You can invite certain people to join the project who can then make notes and comment on each mockup, giving their opinion on the design and suggesting improvements.
Inviting Contributors
This can prove to be useful when working on an app or other type of software, and requesting your colleagues’ opinion on the design before they can start work on the development side. There is also an easy way to remove contributors from the project should they not be needed any more.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I found my experience using Mocksup to be an enjoyable one. Though it is very clear that the app lacks some features that would make it stand out from some others and provide an even better level of customisation, it is still quite good nonetheless. It has some not-so-unique features but they are integrated well to provide a really nice experience.
Honestly priced, this app could earn the status of a killer app for design agencies or companies that work on a lot of projects with more than one team member. For personal use, however, I find it to be less appealing.