justinteractive

That’s what I’ve been asking myself over my morning coffee. Wireframes are the most requested element of IA or UX design this side of the Googleplex but, I fear there’s too much reliance upon them that they’re sapping truly creative solutions and killing innovation.

The wireframe is the web equivalent of the architectural blue print, it’s where the engineers refer when they’re neck deep in production. It’s too often the place the designers spend way too much of their time and for me it’s constraining great design. Think about the hours a designer or IA slaves over a wireframe, delicately tweaking the boxes and arrows alone at her desk, where’s the rich interaction coming from? Better a team sketching liberally and freely, arguing, laughing and innovating.

I spent a short time bashing out a project with a large London agency where the original IA work had failed to meet the project requirements, we needed to act fast. This is when we piled up the sheets of paper, took over a huge section of the office wall and whiteboard and started our IA / UX mural. We pasted up personas, functional requirements and perhaps the odd competitors interface on one side as a continual source of reference to the stuff which should be inspiring our decisions.

This was iterative design at it’s finest. We sketched, we moved sheets of paper on the wall to tweak processes, we used post-its and tracing paper to layer up AJAX interactions, we were vocal and influential. In this way the designers vocalised ideas, the developers picked them up on the unfeasible details, both teams bantered until beautiful simple and rich solutions were arrived at. This all took just half a day and we had it.

If the team had needed to communicate with other stake holders in other locations we photographed the wall on the iphone and we filmed our Creative Director walking through the storyboards and talking out the journeys. These photos were up on our flickr group and the video landed on Vimeo within minutes.

So what did we achieve? The results were so rich that everyone understood where we had gone and where we had arrived. We knew exactly what we had to wireframe and prototype, we could jump right in and bash them out in no time. Most importantly for me though was the sense that we had focussed upon and achieved the right design. We hadn’t asked how do we arrange the elements on this page, we’d sorted out should this page even exist and how can we make the journeys and interactions flow as seamlessly as possible.