Lots of tools are very capable, but if you’re looking for speed, simplicity, and low-to-medium fidelity, there may be a better alternative. You might use Keynote, Visio, Axure, HTML/CSS, Creative Suite, or one of the many Web applications for wireframing-such as Fieldtestapp, Proto.io, or Fluid.ui-and your tool of choice is probably fairly entrenched. But don’t go higher fidelity just because they ask you to, it’s your job to decide whether that’s appropriate. With each client, this process should mimic a dance where you show them low fidelity, they come back asking for higher fidelity, then you translate and distill their requests into a revised wireframe. Without diving too deeply into either the purpose of wireframes or what the appropriate fidelity is for wireframes, I’ll summarize my philosophy: wireframe with just enough detail to communicate your ideas to your intended audience-and never more than that. The faster you can create and distribute your wireframes for review, the more time you have to think, sketch, and revise your work. The goal of wireframing is to communicate an idea quickly. Ideation and sketching should never stop, but at some point, you’ll need to share your ideas with another designer or a developer, and wireframes are a good medium for that. Wireframing Is Not a Magical Deliverable The goal of wireframing is to communicate an idea quickly. Remember, sketching is a skill and requires practice to get better! Once you’ve established sketching as part of your UX workflow, you can move on to wireframing. Jared Spool, Bill Buxton, Peiter Buick, and Dennis Kardy have already made compelling arguments for sketching. If you’re the kind of person who jumps right into your wireframing tool of choice, you’re not yet convinced that sketching is a necessity-and that needs to change.
reflect on their understanding of the problem space.rapidly generate ideas without the constraints of a wireframing tool.“My client wants to look at something more polished than sketches and doesn’t understand my sketches.”īy blasting past sketching, UX designers miss out on the opportunity to.This means you need more practice at sketching!) “My sketching ability is poor, so I wouldn’t be able to communicate the ideas I’m trying to convey.” (The issue is valid, but the end result isn’t.“Because I’m so proficient with this tool, I can ideate in the tool and more quickly achieve my goal of delivering wireframes once we solidify our ideas.”.Some of the justifications I hear are these: Too often, I see UX designers skip sketching and jump into their wireframing tool of choice right away. As long as you’re designing something that people will use on a screen, the way you communicate your design should use a visual medium. Sketching should be your go-to tool anytime you’re discussing or iterating on ideas. It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of sketching ideas early on, during wireframing and even afterward. But as you read on, you’ll see that I’ve found some ways to create wireframes more efficiently, with some UX process and philosophy sprinkled in. So, in comparison to agencies that primarily do Web work, the problems that we run into at Deloitte Digital may be amplified-because we’re dealing with more platforms, devices, interactions, and potentially, the consequent slowing of our workflows.īecause of this, I’m always trying to make my wireframing workflow more efficient, so I can spend more time sketching, thinking about problem spaces, and getting my work out to the broader team for review, so I can iterate on my designs-especially when I’m working on multiple platforms at the same time! Boil down all these problems and needs, and you get this: Wireframe fast at the lowest fidelity possible to communicate and elicit usable feedback from stakeholders.
We do both Web and extensive native mobile design work. Along the way, I facilitate that process by doing user research, sketching, creating personas, and wireframing. As a Senior UX Designer, I get paid to solve problems for clients. Working in an agile studio for Deloitte Digital has its UX challenges.
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