Stuff in my head

You can’t design a User Experience with a wireframe

Wireframes are dead. And good riddance too.

I’m not a fan of wireframes. Never have been. And by wireframes I mean flat diagrams of boxes, lines and placeholder elements for UI widgets, forms and media. 

There’s very few scenarios I can think of where a wireframe has managed to express the intent of a design i’m working on to a level that’s useful beyond a loose guide to IA and page topography. 

Wireframes test horribly test like crap. I’m almost ashamed to have made some big (and potentially costly) design decisions on behalf of clients on the basis of the testing from a wireframe. I’m loathed to ever put another wireframe in front of a user again and ask them to engage with it. They’ll muddle through sure - and occasionally it can help identify comprehension issues and help refine flows, but ropey sketches can also do that too and take a lot less time. It’s so dangerous making big assumptions based on the response to a wireframe because it’s so far removed from the actual product you’re designing. So don’t. Test on paper first, talk to people, then build a prototype and test it properly. 

Too many UX designers waste everyone’s time working up wireframes when they should be working on the actual experience. That comes through the value proposition/exchange, the content and messaging, the GUI, the interaction and the stateful nature of software. And the only way to do that is to build functional prototypes with real content in them.

Visual Design must die too

To get to this state we also need to get over this precious notion that early aesthetic is in someway detrimental to the design process. Sure, if you wade in too soon with a polished UI you risk taking the clients eye off the ball with regard to the design problems you’re trying to communicate and fix, but that’s your fault not theirs for not explaining your rationale properly. We must stop thinking that visual design exists as a layer on top of the stuff we make. It’s not, it’s intrinsic - just like the interaction and behavioural facets of our designs. A design doesn’t really start making sense until it’s all in place - even if not to a finished level of fidelity. Colour, typography, texture, hierarchy, disruption, weight, whitespace… (I could go on) are as important (if not more so in some regards) to the IA that holds it together.  

For some that either requires skilling up or working closer with UI designers, Developers or whoever needs to be involved depending on the skillset of the UX designer doing the work but unless we stop designing diagrams of things instead of actual things you’re not designing an experience you’re designing an expensive hypothesis.