The Right Way to Wireframe, Part 2

Presented by Fred Beecher and Will Evans.

Couldn’t get in to the session I wanted (again!), so I’m at part two of the wireframing extravaganza.

Another example of sketching the interactive flow before actually wireframing (“wireflows”). This is definitely a good concept to take away.

Something I’m thinking about right now, even though it’s not the focus of this presentation, is how important it is to focus on the interactive aspects of a web page. This sounds so obvious, but it’s something I have not done well enough in my own process and in working with stakeholders. (It must be easier for e-commerce organizations to keep interactions front-and-centre in their design process because they are so fundamental to making money. At any rate, the designers presenting here seem to take the centrality of interactions for granted.) In my organization, we seem to spend too much time talking about what we want users to “know” or “realize” rather than what we want them to do.

The presenter is now saying that visual design “is not lipstick” – it is an opportunity to evolve the interactive design. You can, say, move a button to create visual balance, as long as you then test to ensure that the interactive process still works.

Interesting to see how large a role old-fashioned pen, paper, and post-its play in the early stages of the process for all these designers.

Requirements analysis: measure twice, cut once. Stakeholders lie. Users lie. Observation is better than interviewing or surveys.

The Right Way to Wireframe, Part 1

Presented by Todd Zaki Warfel and Russ Unger

This session is about the how. There is a lot of talk about the what and why – “we’re doing great things,” “we’re changing the world through design!”  But no one in the UX field shows their work. We all work on proprietary and confidential stuff. Have you ever seen a wireframe from Jesse James Garrett, Peter Morville, or Jared Spool? This is a call to the UX field to “nut up or shut up” – show your work and let people see what you’re doing, critique it, and learn from it.

Arguments over wireframing versus prototyping and what is the best tool (Visio, Axure, Omnigraffle) are beside the point. The goal is to produce an artifact that functions as a communications tool.

The test case: lend4health.com, a microlending service to connect people who need health care with potential funders.

My takeaways from this:

A technique I’ve never tried is storyboarding an interaction through a 6-8 frame sketch.

Now wondering if the idea of showing your work could be a good way of helping clients understand the process of UX design and the reasoning behind UX recommendations.

Pain-free Design Signoff (Paul Boag)

This session wasn’t my first choice. (The one I was intending to go to filled up while I was in the badge line -up. Sigh.) However, it certainly is relevant. Achieving desgin sign-off was the single most challenging part of our website redesign project.

A lot of the presenter’s recommendations are familiar – educate the client, use moodboards and wireframes, try to talk about problems rather than solutions.

One interesting point – the presenter is from the UK, and he says that if you ask a client to name their favourite website, they all say the BBC. The problem is that they like the BBC website because they like the content. The BBC is a bad reference point – it’s difficult to translate its success to other websites.

All in all, not sure I learned anything new here.