The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

The death of the wireframe document

By Matt Pollitt, Director

5K - Designing Digital

|

The Drum Network article

This content is produced by The Drum Network, a paid-for membership club for CEOs and their agencies who want to share their expertise and grow their business.

Find out more

August 14, 2015 | 4 min read

You know that 100-page wireframe document you have laboured over for the last month? For the new app/e-commerce site/unicorn digital product/software application - the one you and the rest of your design team are really excited about? Burn it - it’s useless. What's more, it's a massive waste of your client’s money.

The days of labouring over a 100-page wireframe document are over.

There are probably some account managers and new business people squirming in their Ted Baker suit jackets at the idea. For design consultancies and user experience agencies around the country, the wireframe document has been a mainstay for a large amount of billing, while keeping designers busy with alterations, amendments and documentation.

However – for complex applications, how can a 100+ page static document really communicate the experience of using an interactive experience? How can 2D diagrams relate the sense of emotion, intuitiveness and experience of interacting with a service or product? How can you gauge the reaction of a user, as well as assume that a stakeholder can mentally visualize the working product? How do you deal with the inevitable changes that come with designing software in a manageable and efficient way?

I speak from experience as an ex doc-aholic. At 5K, for the first year we invested a huge amount of our designers time, sanity and our clients money in creating epic, manicured documentation for the applications we were working on. They were beautiful documents – detailed, annotated and expertly laid out. To this day I am proud of those documents and the resulting services that came from them. However, there was a better way – both in regards to cost to the client and the quality of the end product. We realised that we were spending a huge amount of time on the creation of these epic masterpieces, which could have been better spent refining the design and gaining actual user feedback.

2013 saw us start to incorporate interactive wireframes into our projects (at the time using clickable key-note mockups as no great software existed for devices like iPads), but we still held onto (out of fear) to producing large documents to go alongside them. As of the end of 2014 we ditched the documents completely and only produced interactive wireframes and visual prototypes for our clients using inVision, which we annotated using their comments feature. It was scary at first, missing our comfort blanket-esque documents - worrying that without documented proof, our clients would not see the value in what we do. However the results completely blew us away.

Overnight we went from spending 15 - 20% percentage of a project timeline documenting to getting to spend that on actual design. Suddenly we went from tentative nods in design review meetings to expressive, excited feedback, as people interacted with the clickable prototype - discovering elements they liked and others that frustrated them. We also gained a huge insight from contextually observing them going through the user journeys on the actual devices they were designed for.

Cutting out the full documentation process and instead moving to an iterative interactive model can save you up to 20 per cent of a project budget depending on the scale of the application or software you are working on. That’s 20 per cent more time that can be spent designing and quickly testing solutions instead of drafting documents that will only briefly be of use. When you are looking at 6 months of a billable team - that can make one hell of a difference!

All in all, although the budget element is great in itself - the real win is the extra engagement and collaboration you will get with a project stakeholder team, as well as interaction with current or potential users that you can also test on during the early stages of the design process - and the valuable insights these return.

Matt Pollitt is director of 5K Digital Design.

Content by The Drum Network member:

5K - Designing Digital

At 5K we combine common sense, deep knowledge and a passion for solving complex problems to deliver innovation and change through screens of all sizes.

 

We...

Find out more

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +