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.

The Web 2.0 Awards

It was with great interest yesterday that I scrolled down the list of award winners of the Web 2.0 Awards. Admittedly these were given in May (and this is July) but I had just seen a link to it recently.

I also forwarded the link on to my coworker and friend David who remarked something to the effect of.. "I use a lot of these sites!" Perhaps Dave should start his own awards site as well. But he brings up a very good point in that simple statement.

Web 2.0 is really about usability. Taking all of the things that we have supposedly LEARNED over the past 10 years and applying them to clean, well thought out interfaces that are all about community. And the simple rule is, you don't gain a community without making it easy to use. All of these sites excel at that.

David is a member of a lot of these communities. As are many of us. The court of public opinion could decide these awards very easily in many ways. However it doesn't always work that way. You won't notice a single award to MySpace. Thankfully.

Anyway, look down the list of winners, check some of them out. Join some of these communities and see how they work for you. These are sites that we should be trying to CONTINUE to learn from. I am praying that we don't have to endure a Web 3.0 and on and on... but simply just start adding what we are learning today to what we build tomorrow.

To me, the whole Web 2.0 term is just a short way of saying that we have finally started to recast the very foundation of the Web. To dig new footings and pour new concrete that we can REALLY build on this time. These sites have rebuilt this strong foundation on the Web that will indeed allow that growth. Check them out.