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Software Options For software, Balsamiq is great for simplicity, Omnigraffle Pro is great for complexity (with templates from Konigi and others off of Graffletopia.com. Sketching Is Way Better To Start With Nothing beats sketching for getting your ideas out quickly, iterating easily, and not feeling too "in love" with creations that need to die. Tools for ...

This might be relevant for you: 5 tips on sketching user interfaces: Draw box-elements with four separate lines — do not try to draw them with one continuous stroke. Use drop shadow to distinguish graphical elements. Use a thick sharpie to focus on loose form rather than details. Get your arm off the paper: you'll draw with your shoulder rather ...

For exploring loose ideas (alone or in person), I use paper or whiteboard. When I'm preparing low fidelity wireframes for presentation, I use Balsamiq Mockups. Things I like about Balsamiq: Lots of existing drop in UI components (including community created) I can easily save custom symbols for reuse Keyboard shortcuts make adding components fast (for ...

Ask yourself why they don't think it's important. (Or maybe ask them). There may be very distinct reasons: Write Once, Run Forever Software i.e. not seeing software as an iterative process, not seeing the necessity of early customer feedback Throwing Code Away i.e. seeing a software UI prototype as "half the product", and "throwing that away would be ...

Leading industry ui/ux prototyping or sketching software's are many in the market. Both online/desktop. It mainly depends on to what level of fidelity/interactions you want to capture on the interface. Just for Basic - Medium fidelity i suggest you can use Axure with all different libraries/widgets loaded, otherwise your prototyping life is miserable in ...

Android Stencil kit Android Wireframe Template (printable PDF) A Collection of Printable Sketch Templates and Sketch Books for Wireframing

Design techniques that come in my mind (which are not solely UX). I tried to sort it from unsharp to more precise. Brainstorming, which has its focus on throw out ideas rather than comment them. Collect ideas. Use a Artist Diary where you sketch and write ideas that come into your mind. Always have it with you. Idea is a elusive and flawy matter. Collect ...

As an alternative to pencil and paper sketching, I recommend using a Wacom tablet + MyPaint. MyPaint is a drawing opensource software with the following features that make it a good choice for sketching: Infinite canvas. You can always draw at any side of your current sketch since there are no margins. Lots of brushes You can use lots of different brushes ...

Here's a blog post that has some ideas: http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/tools-for-sketching-user-experiences/ There's a Flickr group, though I don't know if it's being moderated anymore: http://www.flickr.com/groups/uxsketches/pool/ And Jakob Linowski has a lot of great posts on hand sketching: http://wireframes.linowski.ca/ Personally, I'm a fan of simple ...

As stated by them (androidpatterns.com) it's done in Fireworks (see attachement below) using their own custom Toolkit. You can download the toolkit here.

Evolus pencil includes a set of sketchy stencils. I am not sure whether Pencil was used or not, but you could achieve a similar result. Here is an example from their screenshot gallery:

Big fan of: mental notes KJ technique (http://www.uie.com/articles/kj_technique/) collaborative UI sketching exercises We use sketching a lot ... either (1) the whole team working in parallel on designs, followed by a review workshop with the client (the workshop is the 'deliverable', not the sketches themselves), or (2) even collaborative sketching ...

Usually people like to see "something real", which is why they may be concerned about sketching out the UI. Where you're going to deviate from what your manager expects, it's best to explain ahead of time what you want to do and why it adds value. Quantifying the task for your manager and agreeing deliverables will also re-assure them that this is a ...

Here's a device-art wireframing stencil in SVG form for handsets and tablets, from the Designing Effective Navigation article in Android Training: Android Device Wireframe Art (SVG)

Yup. Paper and pencil and pen wins hands-down. All your hand sketching experience will inform any screen "drawing" you do and make it better. I also second the hands-on simplicity of sending scans and photos of your sketches. Design is thinking and form-making. Screen tools that make it too easy to make images do not contribute to thoughtful design. If you ...

I'll recommend Adobe Fireworks. It's great because: It's designed for web design so it is really fast You could use symbols for resuable elements such as buttons, windows etc It supports 9-slice scaling You could build fully interactive prototypes without coding With this wireframe kit you could quickly build pages to test without distracting design And ...

Pen and paper cannot be mentioned often enough. The flexibility in the early fases is a must-have. After that: Axure is what I use, but I've also heard good things about Balsamic.

I might be reading this wrong, but there seems to be an implicit assumption here that freehand sketching practice must be achieved through analogue means. If you have access to an iPad and stylus, I can heartily recommend the Brushes or Penultimate iPad apps as a way of getting better at sketching freehand. I had almost totally abandoned sketching on paper ...

The most important part is to understand when you need to sketch in different mediums and styles. Learning when to create the ugly dirty sketches that are simple explorations versus creating actual interactive wireframes. There are many people who draw using illustrator and a tablet, and they are super quick. The nice thing about that medium for instance is ...

Playing off of peterchen's comments: I've created "sketchy" UI templates within OmniGraffle and Keynote to discourage "nit-picky" comments and encourage feedback on more important items, such as workflow and such — with very positive results. It's clear to whomever I am presenting to that this isn't a 100% complete product. I received ZERO comments on ...

On the sketching front I would particularly recommend: Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam I also find myself largely agreeing with http://konigi.com/book/sketch-book However the absolute best way of improving is just that tedious process of practice ;-) A couple of years back I filled a couple of notebooks with a ...

I'm going to bet that you've already found a ton of good resources to read about that explain how to do design and follow design processes. I think your best bet of improving your actual design skills, though, is by actually doing design work. It might be worthwhile for you to just pick up some "throwaway" or "do it just because" design work, and get real ...

Some resources I like: Jakob Nielsen http://useit.com Donal Norman http://jnd.org Bruce Tognazzini http://asktog.com Designer Forum http://designerstalk.com http://alistapart.com http://smashingmagazine.com There's a lot more out there, I'm sure others will recommend their favorite resources.

The other answers here are all good, but I'd like to propose a simpler answer to when a boss thinks sketching is worthless: "It's easier for me to start over/change/erase this sketch than it is for me to rewrite these 10/100/1000 lines of code or rework this design in Photoshop. This sketch will allow me to get your feedback to avoid cost-inducing rework ...

Nothing will better replace pencil and paper. And for this, I would recommend the Action Method paper tools from the Behance Network. I use their dot grid cahier and notebook everyday and it's really professional and beautiful. What's cool is that they have adapted this Paper Action method to web, ipad and mobile. You should check it out. As of ...