Why Wireframes are Bad for Designers

Recently I have had a ton of design work cross my desk. And despite my previous post regarding the use of our new Creative Brief format, many have come and gone without the benefit of that document.

In some cases I have instead gotten a "wire frame" drawn up by the account executive or by the project manager. And although I do greatly appreciate their efforts on behalf of our clients to get all of the important information into the interface design, wire frames come with a certain risk that as a designer, I always hate to confront.

Wire frames by their nature IMPLY design. When putting information onto a page and moving it around, the person creating a wire frame is in essence suggesting layout. And this is where I take issue with designers seeing wire frames. In fact, I would say showing these wire frames to clients may give them an unrealistic impression of what the final design will look like.

A designer can not help but feel beholden to the various locations set up by a wire frame. If the wire frame shows navigation on the left then the design will most likely reflect that. Especially when the client has seen the wire frame and has an expectation based upon it.

To really allow our designers to design, we have really tried to put the wire frame out of our staff's reach. As a company, we still do wire framing to help with usability issues and also to help us assess functionality. But as far as design goes, we are trying to quash the wire frame entirely.

Instead we are now working with a document we call a PDD... or Page Description Document. These PDDs help up prioritize the information required on a page, but do not imply location in any way. The PDD is created with columns that are set up to allow the project manager or account exec to set PRIORITY levels for various elements. In this way, we can use our ability as designers to create a usable interface design while keeping the client's needs in mind with the relative priority of each element.

I am curious to know what other design firms are doing in the realm and how they use various documents to impart information to designers without implying design. If you have any thoughts or feedback on this, please drop me a line or respond to this post.