Russell:
Yeah. Macaw is one of the ones that is trying to be like a responsive tool for designer and for wireframe stuff as well. I spent a good few hours trying to get a grip of it and really struggled too. Their difference is because it is specially designed tool as well. You need to be designing everything with pretentious in mind because they don’t just do breakpoints and create one at 320, create one at 480 and that kind of stuff. It’s fluid between every one. Which is what we should be aiming for and we’ll get onto that in a little while, but moving your.. the way it works just wasn’t quite right for me.
Tom:
Yeah. Didn’t quite make the.. Maybe we might get back to it at some point. Might.
Russell:
We should revisit. I mean, that’s something that we’re kind of looking at at the moment is what are the problems that we found with our tools at this stage.
Tom:
It’s a tricky one because there’s a new tool like this every week really. There’s a new tool for everything in the way all the time and wireframing and prototyping or whatever. I think we looked at Webflow before, which, could be used for anything. Balsamiq and old school things like that still exist and I’m sure they’re different now. They’re always making improvements. Yeah pen is always changing as well. It’s kind of hard to know which one to invest your time in and a lot of them are a paid thing. You try for a bit. Like with Macaw, you kind of got to invest time in actually getting a grip of how it works. There is a learning curve to some of them. Which is funny because wireframe is going to be a simple, simple thing, but actually some of the tools now are getting so advanced that, to get the most out of them, you got to spend a fair amount of time in them.
Russell:
Also maybe wireframes can’t be a simple thing when you’re working on big complex projects anymore like when the stuff you want to prototype how an interaction works. You can’t do that with pen and paper anymore. You’d really struggle to. It does require that bigger system.
Tom:
That’s the thing we so want to move on to is that wireframes are complex things now. For a kind of brochure site that we’d be doing, you can show a sitemap with the ease of journey and content. That’s what wireframes are really good at and they’ve always been really good at that. Now they’re kind of like, when you’re developing products, you need that stage before design has been done, but actually kind of what you need now is to show interaction more and all that kind of stuff. That’s where actually a prototype becomes more what you’re after. For prototypes, that’ll work. there’s this blur between when does a wireframe end and when you should really just be prototyping a piece of interaction or the whole thing. Should it be some kind of bootstrap to HTML document that you can just make? Or does it stick in the old school style or new school style wireframing thing? I don’t think we know the answer.
Russell:
No, I’m not sure on it yet. I mean, the first kind of problem with some of those tools is like.. well the responsive thing is that a factor can be found, right?
Tom:
That’s the biggest problem there.
Russell:
It is we can’t and don’t make stuff with just a desktop anymore. Also like, in most cases, can’t just do something for mobile and make people guess what’s happening in between.
Tom:
Definitely.
Russell:
To show the in between stuff is more of an investment of your time and the tools that you can do it with.. well, either difficult or don’t exist.
Tom:
Yeah.
Russell:
You can always get to the point where you have build the stuff in code yourself. At some point you’re going to be making breakpoints up. You’re almost like writing code.