The role – and the order – of wireframing in the design process feels different in these swirling times.
What has not changed is the utility of wireframing as a tool for encouraging clarity of thought. Working in a purposefully low fidelity forces us to consider our applications in terms of their data structures and primitives. To be coherent at the lowest levels. To lay strong foundations, prefer simple abstractions. Wireframing prevents us from using shiny enhancements as a fig leaf for weak thought.
But there is a second reason that wireframing is a staple in the early stages of software design, and that has changed a lot: we used to prove our ideas in low fidelity first because high fidelity was expensive. And now it isn’t.
This has changed my process, and I sometimes find myself working backwards on purpose: building a whole array of medium fidelity prototypes in order to quickly, iteratively, and intuitively feel out a UX that resonates, and then – only after arriving at a polished experience – concretizing those ideas in wireframe form to share with the team and collect feedback.
It’s interesting that we do that at all, the flattening back. I think two things are true here:
First, it’s a byproduct of wireframes still being good at their other job. They make us look slowly at a static thing, and think about it, and they provide that series of still, specific moments where we can leave remarks and have discussions.
But second, I think we don’t yet have the tool that’s implied to exist at this intersection: how do you leave a figma-style comment on a particular moment in the event stream of a throwaway interface? 1
This isn’t an everyday ocurrence yet, but I think it will be soon.
I think this product is has a newly strengthened cause to exist. First, because there’s a much higher volume of the kind of workflow that calls for it. Second, because it’s easier to build for those same reasons. The product I’ve just described would be a truly daunting undertaking 5 years ago, and is much less so today.
Footnotes
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This is (quite) imperfectly solved in video workflows like loom, but I envision something else that I’ve yet to see done. Some kind of application wrapper that’s aware of the actions I’m taking, lets me do things and then add feedback at a specific point, or around a set of points, and then send that off like a fixture so that my coworkers can replay it, or recreate it, or otherwise mess with the real thing. ↩