Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Chris Sainsbury

Chris Sainsbury — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:13:06 GMT

At the end of the day wireframes are about communicating ideas to various stakeholders and it’s certainly true that static wireframes can only go so far in doing this. I much prefer being able to present to the client personally, but all too often this is not possible.

Annotation is a start, and bulding interactive prototypes gives us new options, but in a way that may be very time-consuming. I have produced 50-60 page wireframe docs that contain a lot of redundancy in order to communicate ideas as clearly as possible. But is it necessarily true this is a ‘bad thing’ in itself? I have found developers welcome the clarity increased redundancy brings rather than feeling overwhelmed.

But I’m certainly interested to hear more, and ways of effectively and efficiently templating documents – or creating automated processes – to enable changes to be made once that update the whole document are certainly interesting.

Chris Sainsbury — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:16:00 GMT

Sounds like a great idea! Does this have to be a digital product, though? Or can we submit suggestions for all kind of products a la ‘the design of everyday things’?

Chris Sainsbury — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:46:55 GMT

I’d certainly like to hear more on this subject, and even reading the comments here is interesting in itself. I’ve recently written that wireframes are simply facilitators for discussion, but I now know that this does not fully illustrate their usefulness (although I stand by the article). Luke Perman’s point above about 3 uses for wireframes is really useful, and Robert Griffin reminds me to refer to the ‘polar bear book’ for more thoughts on this subject.
http://www.idrawboxes.com/2008/wireframes-are-simply-faci…