A Running Jump

If wire frames are dead. Where do I go from here?

‘Wire frames are dead, long live rapid protyping’. This is a statement I see over and over again in the UX community on Blogs and on Twitter.

Added to the recent interest in ‘Designers who can code’. I have been doing some thinking.

I take great pride in the presentation and usefulness of the documentation I produce, and painstakingly tune every detail, but whats the point?

For some time I have been frustrated by two main things; The first being the difficulty in explaining interactions and behaviors in words and static pictures. The second is having taken a lot of time and effort painstakingly writing wire frame annotations to explain interactions, only to have them misinterpreted or not read at all.

When I talk I use my hands to explain and act things out, as such when I am discussing my wire frames in person I can do this acting out to get the idea across, once I’m out of the picture, things are out of my hands, my painstaking work is diluted.

As such I want to find a way to change the way I design interactions.

Firstly, I want to ween myself off Omnigraffle. When I made the move from visual designer to UX Designer a couple of years ago, I made the shift from Photoshop to Omnigraffle. It was a natural shift to make it was intuitive to me. Omnigraffle and its counterparts are limiting, they are static, the closest thing to a prototype you can make is a PDF click through (I am excluding Axure and similar from this). This is just not good enough.

I am also a big advocate of the importance of sketching, but sketches are first and foremost a tool to help the sketcher think. They are also a way of explaining something visually. That explanation is always more poignant if someone can either see you drawing, or see you pointing and gesticulating. Therefore useless in my Absence.

So, where do I go from here?

If I follow the popular consensus I should start updating my HTML and CSS knowledge. This seems a little much, although certainly something to think about. Tools such as Axure, for rapid prototyping are making a lot of sense to me, as methods to improve the communication of my designs and interactions.