Wireframes are no longer for communicating
I used to think that wireframes were a great way to communicate abstract design decisions to the rest of the project team. Needless to say, I no longer feel this way. As a matter of fact, I think they are one of the worst ways to communicate these decisions. But, wireframes are not all bad. Each person should use the tool that works best for them and their environment.
Here are some of my frustrations…
Wireframes take a really long time to create and there really is NO good application out there for them. For interactive internat applications, which I mostly work on, it’s even more difficult. How do you document easily and concisely in a 2D space how to interact with an object in virtual 3D?
Most folks don’t want to read–EVER. IAs take a really long time creating accurate wireframes, annotating all the components, reviewing, tweaking, versioning, etc, only to have the stacks sit on someone’s desk gathering dust until there’s a meeting where the IA will essentially explain everything in person anyway. It’s not a negative comment on the folks who receive the wireframes, just an observation that IAs just might be wasting their time on these documents.
There must be a better way to communicate IA and UX decisions, but I believe that can only happen if the process by which these products are developed also changes.
But, wireframes have been helpful to me in brainstorming (minus the massive annotations) and in analyzind and identifying details of an interface that I may have missed. It’s a great exercise for me to catch issues ahead of time that I might not be able to find otherwise. Then again, isn’t that just a form of paper prototyping?
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Brovo!
I’ve said for years that the navigation diagrams and flows that I do are mainly for myself. I don’t think they help anyone on the team understand anything simply because most people simply want me to spoon-feed the info to them. And that’s not really a bad thing. Talking is a much better way of getting people to understand than throwing documents over the wall.
I don’t think wireframes are a waste of time, but I think they shouldn’t be final documentation. They are a design tool. They are living things that change throughout the process. I don’t even think that they should be the IAs total responsibility. Every one on the team should be providing input. That’s why I prefer online documentation so much more than Visio. I think documentation is complex and paper documents just can’t capture the kind of complexity involved in such a highly dynamic and changing world.
I also think it’s very difficult for one person to capture all decisions made on a project. I’m not even at every meeting, so how can every decision that impacts the UI or user experience be captured? Group documentation is what I want to spend some time exploring. If everyone is responsible for the final deliverable, then everyone will have a stake in knowing what has been decided upon.
My 2 cents!