UXD - User eXperience Design

Wireframes: Much More Effective than Interpretive Dance

Wireframes are a valuable tool in designing a site or application. They enable us to communicate both the layout and page content to fellow team members and business stakeholders and get their signoff. They’re essential because they force viewers to focus on the content, not the visual design, which means preliminary design meetings won’t get sidetracked into discussions on colors and fonts.

Basically, wireframes are a sketch of the business and user requirements. Since they are a drawing, they allow us to demonstrate how these requirements, nicely bulleted in a list format, are translated to a visual medium. In addition to showing that the requirements are met, wireframes can generate discussions uncovering what may have been overlooked. As the project progresses, we use them to begin explorations on how the user will interact with the screens and which data is affected.

Great Article on Prototyping Complex Interactions

If you haven't already read it, you really should. Andres Zapata has published an excellent article over at boxesandarrows entitled The Guided Wireframe Narrative for Rich Internet Applications. A brief taste:

The key to using a low-context medium (wireframes) to illustrate high-context information (rich internet applications) is to narrate the information in layers or in dimensions. In short, because we couldn’t build a prototype (due to time and budget constraints), we built a story. But because it wasn’t a linear application, multiple stories needed to be constructed. We call these stories the Guided Wireframe Narrative.

Our story or narrative focused on four main dimensions:

• Hierarchy


• Screen real estate


• Design conventions


• Interaction patterns

We call these multiple stories microflows.  Lots of food for thought here. Go and read it now.

 

Visualizing Rich Interactions in Paper Prototypes

Wireframes and paper prototypes work well in documenting the standard page metaphor of the Web, as the functionality of each screen can be captured in a single wireframe. Rich interactions, though, pose the challenge of expressing a series of states that may occur on a single screen.

As technologies like AJAX gain greater popularity, designers face the challenge of exploring and developing new and innovative visual vocabularies and flexible tools for capturing the microflows of rich interactivity.

At Pathfinder, we are drawing inspiration from the discipline of storyboarding, which is, of course, closely related to wireframing. Storyboards express ideas in a sequence of "key frames," showing only the minimum number of frames to convey the idea. The richness of storyboards comes not from just the individual pictures, but from the change from picture to picture. It's possible, then, to embed a miniature storyboard into a wireframe, thus illustrating the quality of the rich interaction.

A second technique is to create a visual taskflow representation to the system. In this format, all screens are miniaturized to capture both the linear and non-linear flows within individual screens and from screen to screen.

Our fellow practitioners are tackling this challenge as well. Bill Scott considers several strategies for creating interactive wireframes, including the PowerPoint clickthroughs, the development of quick and easy RIA toolkits, and standardized notations to indicate interaction effects in traditional, static wireframes. His personal technique involves the creation of storyboards in Visio, which he then animates. The strategy is detailed in his blog entry, "Interactive Wireframes: Documenting RIAs."