Balsamiq

Rev.com Uses Mockups to Help Its Translation Services Stand Out from the Crowd

This week's Champion is Mark Chen from Rev.com. Mark wrote us one of those emails that we absolutely love to get that started with this: "We love using Balsamiq at Rev.com and would like to be able to tell the whole world about it."

I mentioned this blog to him and he graciously agreed to answer some questions about what he does and how he uses Balsamiq Mockups.

Q&A with Mark Chen

What is your title or job description?

VP, Product.

What industry do you work in?

Rev is a marketplace for the best online freelancers. We provide two services: document translation and audio transcription.

What interesting trends do you see in your role or industry?

While there has been an industry trend of minimizing the role of humans in the process, through crowdsourcing and automation, we believe that living human beings will always provide a superior deliverable when it comes to understanding natural language.

How are you different from your competition?

Very few translation and transcription vendors are focused on the customer. Projects must be submitted for formal quotes. Online ordering is not possible, nor is paying with a credit card. We try to make our site and service as easy to use as possible to reduce the burden on our customers.

Which Balsamiq product(s) do you use?

We use Mockups for Desktop and the Mockups plugin for JIRA. We have a team of five product managers and designers that all use Balsamiq to help create wireframes. Some use a PC, some use a Mac. Mockups is able to work across all platforms as a wireframing tool.

How has Mockups contributed to your success?

Mockups has been key for our team of product managers to think through a spec before our designers create visual designs. Mockups is really easy and quick to use, so we can focus on the potential ways a user will interact with our site, rather than how we can represent that on a screen. Our creative team appreciate that the specs they receive are more comprehensive than a long list of requirements.

What is your favorite Mockups feature?

Rev is a data-driven company. We have a lot of pages of metrics and data, so my favorite aspect of Mockups is how easy it is to create tables. I can just start thinking about what I want to display and not have to worry about how many rows or columns there are a priori.

Do you have any feature ideas or suggestions for how we can improve our product(s)?

The only features I wish you would add is some myBalsamiq-type additions like one-click saving to the web so we can share our designs with each other. Right now, we export to PNG and email them or upload to basecamp.

Mark was also generous enough to share a mockup and screenshot of a web app they created to help their transcriptionists be more productive.


Thanks, Mark, for sharing your experience with the community!

Do you have a story to share about the awesome things you do with Balsamiq? Send an email to champions@balsamiq.com with your stories or blog posts!

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