welterweightUX

Most of my week has been spent playing around with different wireframing tools. Basically, our fresh-faced UX team is trying to figure out what will work best for us. We’ve all used different things in the past and need/want to come to a consensus, so it seems worthwhile to see what’s new and hot.

While researching, I came across Travis Isaacs’s presentation, Keynote Kung-Fu: How to wireframe like a ninja. As the name suggests, it’s about using Apple’s Keynote to create wireframes.

This slide (#106) really grabbed me:

Here’s the thing—I didn’t hear the audio of the presentation, so I’m not exactly sure if he meant you could fancy up your wireframes up with visuals or that you should do so.

In my experience with client work, I’ve noticed that wireframes are taken very, very literally. Even if you preface them and continually remind the stakeholders that nothing’s set in stone and that the frames are more of a living roadmap, they always get stuck on small visual happenstance like:

• Why is this text bolded?
• Why is it this shade of gray used?
• Shouldn’t this font be bigger?

Things like that. They focus on the wrong details and end up missing the big picture. Even with a lot of handholding.

I totally agree with what I surmise Travis is saying. Do a whizz-bang job when creating wireframe. Make things look good—high fidelity theoretically should help cement ideas. But from what I’ve experienced, it seems like mixing too much wow into your wireframes could easily backfire. And it may thoroughly sidetrack your discussion with stakeholders.

It’s a tangled mess of psychology, really.

It’s almost like the complete opposite of the Ipsum Lorem issue, where you’re offering up too much and what’s on offer isn’t real. Wireframes are not and should not be visual design. Using wireframes as visual design is like asking an infant to perform surgery.

At least that’s how I see it. But I’ve never done very hi-fi wireframes. Mostly, I’ve used Hotgloo, which doesn’t have a rough sketch-y look like Balsamiq, et al. So maybe I’ve done mid-fi frames?

Have you presented hi-fi wireframes to clients? And if so, what were the results? I’d love to hear. Tweet me your response, since my commenting on here admittedly sucks.