Russell:
Yeah, I think understanding or, at least, educating clients as to what the importance of wireframes is and what it’s actually telling you. Sometimes you’ll find that.. well, I think, early mistakes in wireframe is making them look too nice. The lowest end of the scale is to sketch on paper with a pen or pencil or something. The higher end is that you can kind of make something look a bit designing, right? Those are the early mistakes you make with wireframes is that.
Tom:
Well we’ve done it. It depends on the client, doesn’t it? Because, no, we’ve done a project we’ve worked on recently and we put the wireframe in front of them and then that became the design. It was like that wasn’t the intention goal.
Russell:
Yeah, it’s never the intention.
Tom:
It’s like, appreciate that these look pretty good for wireframes, but oh my God, this a bad situation we’ve got now.
Russell:
I mean, it kind of tells you that maybe you didn’t communicate correctly or you’ve put too much work in when, in the design stage, someone refers back to the wireframes about something to assess it. That needs to be a clear cut line and that wireframes is supposed to just talk about how content can be displayed and the layouts you think are going to work. What thy aren’t supposed to talk about is anything to do with any of your colour scheme. There’s no design there at all with any of the sort with theme to it. That’s like something we still find nauseating. We need to make clear of that.
Tom:
It’s really difficult to make that cool because it does depend on who the client or how switched on they are. Plenty of the people that we work with are all about wireframes can do it themselves and you don’t really have to worry about those people, but certainly with people who are unfamiliar with that. It can be a problem if they look at it and be like, “I don’t understand what this is.” Then you’re like, “Well, that’s a barrier to us getting any further on this because you don’t fully understand what you’re seeing.” How would you provide comments? That stuff can be quite tricky. I mean, there’s way to get over it and, in general, people do understand once you walk them through it, but there’s always that worry, you know?
Russell:
I mean, there’s even that issue that some of the nicer tools you use now, they will make your wireframes look better and that’s a problem in itself, right?
Tom:
Yeah.
Russell:
Because, “Oh, that means this is a nicer tool to be using” that can cause problems down the line. People were like “we actually realise the fonts and the wireframe.” That’s fine, but no. There’s no way that decision should come from.
Tom:
I remember a time we were doing some testing on a wireframe for one of our older clients and it was quite a worked up wireframe it was for user testing, which, is again another good thing of wireframes is they can be designed to look like a site. Therefore, you can test use journeys. You can test layout all that kind of stuff. Very, very.. you haven’t spent ages on this thing. You just spent time on the wireframe. One of the guys just looks at it it and was like, “Yeah, it looks really good. You going to put some colour in it?” It’s just like, this isn’t the site? I mean, yeah, of course. He was like, “Oh, I like grey, but, you know, maybe you should try blue.” It’s like, come on man.