Use All Five, Inc.

Why wireframes won’t hurt your project, and why you should be using them

I recently found an article floating around in the design community titled “Why wireframes can hurt your project“. It’s by Sacha Greif, who lists a handful of reasons why the common web designer shouldn’t worry about creating wireframes. To sum it up, he basically states not only do wireframes waste time, they also can negatively affect the designer’s ability to make revisions, therefore hurting the website.

Greif goes on to state that there are new technologies and movements that push wireframes into irrelevancy. He explains that with jQuery, the lean startup movement, and 37Signals, it isn’t necessary anymore to wireframe. What this means is, you should jump into developing and worry about problems when they arise, because you can’t predict how people will be using your website or app. Fair enough, but I still disagree.

When you wireframe before delving into the design, you can quickly map out your website, pages, and pieces of functionality. It ends up being the blueprint. At Use All Five, every project begins with building wireframes. It’s the easiest way to set expectations with the client. Wireframes also allow our development team to commence work before a design is in place.

If we were to jump into design phase immediately, trivial things such as color can hold up the entire process from being signed off by the client. The wireframe brings focus to the functionality, without having to worry about design. The whole idea is to remove subjectivity completely while mapping out the site—we tend to keep design separate from the wireframe phase.

Wireframes give you a clear focus and vision. It’s a manifesto and a todo-list. It can be tempting to dive into a project immediately, but without a clear definition of what the website is, it can end up in production purgatory, with no end in sight.

You shouldn’t also base your website off of a specific technology, it should be designed around an idea. If you use JQuery or Rails without any sort of plan, you’re going to work your design around what technologies can do, rather than finding what technologies will work best for your idea.

Greif’s wireframe alternative is to create a bulleted site map. I think this is an OK idea, but the depth we put into the functionality, page-flow and navigation is worth the extra hours.

Don’t be lazy, plan your website out fully, wireframe, and then get to the fun stuff.