Wireframing

Wireframes are to development what storyboards are to film; they are essential tools for planning a system's functional flow, layout and navigation in a way that is quick to produce, understand and ensure consistency. This is one of the most fundamentally important parts of the development process, get this wrong and you'll actually be building errors into the system by design.

Wireframing gets user buy-in from the start, they can see and influence directly how the system will work for them.

As communication tools go there are few better because everybody, users, clients, content creators, consultants, designers and developers have exactly the same information before them. These documents aren't just the foundation of the system design they are the structure it hangs off. As the requirements gathering change and flow in accordance with changing user and client needs and user paths diverge from preconceived ideas the wireframing changes too to quickly identify what problems and solutions will be met before a single line of code has been written.

Wireframing to me is second-knowledge, I started my working career by using markers and a pad to produce 'scamps' for printing ideas, illustrating before hand how a final design is going to look, feel and work is just natural.

© Bob Powell