Proper Design Preparation: Creating Wireframes Help Preventing Communication Issues And Content Being Forgotten
We all know the saying that a picture tells you more than a thousand words. In some cases it may help more than a 1000 words! Recently I had written an article about the importance of discussion before and during development of a site. The following paragraphs will also cover an important aspect that will help: prevent forgetting key web pages, material and functionalities. This used to befall me too, before we came across the art of wireframing. When starting the development process of my bubble shooter and bubble game portals, we forgot a few obvious things. Mostly these are pages that simply have to be there to support certain functions. Probably you will also reveal a lot of functionality that simply wasn’t properly thought of. Locating these flaws during preparing can save considerable time during the development process and decrease your costs.
A wireframe can be seen as a visualization method of presenting proposed functions, design and material of the web site you are about to develop. You can either decide to draw your wireframes from scratch, use of the tools available online or download a professional tool. Don’t make the mistake of confusing the wireframe for design. Just use it to portray all content that should be on a page and ways in which it should perform. Leave creativity and flavor to your creative designers, just propose wireframes are here to help them. A couple of things that will help are not making your wireframes look really neat and try to create all of them in black and white. Convincing some designers that wireframes are useful can be a hard job though.
Tools that you might want to try (next to pen and paper) are iPlotz or Axure. With for instance Axure you can generate HTML pages out of your wireframe and have a clickable prototype. When dealing with bigger sites this can be a very helpful method to agree the features being built during development. It will also help to detect functionalities that don’t have so much use and toss them in the trash can. Presenting and creating these prototypes partially together with your customers will allow you to have a common understanding before reaching the development phase! Also developers can use the clickable prototype close to the delivered designs to see how a page should really work. I discovered this helped very much with the development of my bubbles shooter portal. Developers don’t need to go through prolonged functional designs in this way.