Wireframes totally don't do what they're supposed to. But they are useful anyway.
I was sitting with my girlfriend in a hotel room in Connecticut a few weeks ago. We came down for a wedding, but like good citizens of the internet economy, we were both tele-working from the hotel room all afternoon before the wedding.
She had a call to present some wireframes she was working on (she works at another web firm) to present them to the team and talk them out before the client meeting. Then they strategized on how to handle the client meeting.
And when she got off the phone we were chatting about wireframes and presenting them to the client and how it NEVER goes well, and it just hit us:
Weren’t wireframes invented so that we could easily, rapidly present information architecture ideas to a client on paper, so that they could offer input prior to devs committing valuable resources to developing? So that we could “lock down” the functionality in advance? And doesn’t this NEVER WORK? I mean, sure. If you’ve got a strong internal team, or you’re working on software development with seasoned web people, then yeah, they work. But presenting to lay clients? They never get it. They need to see it designed. They need to see it clickable. It’s amazing how in all my years of being in web development, a good 80% of all my wireframe presentations have been to people who don’t know what they’re looking at, and don’t want to commit to functionality until they can see how it all works together. It’s a bit too extreme to say the exercise is pointless, but when I think of all the effort we expended on it, I’m tempted to say most of the time the exercise was futile. It’s almost as if wireframes can’t actually accomplish the thing we invented them to do.
It gets even worse when you throw agile into the mix, of course, because then you’re presenting these wireframes to the client and asking for changes now, so you don’t have to make them later, except we’re all in a methodology that allows for us to change them later. So why even show them?
And yet… and yet… internally, we are making more and more wireframes internally. We used to almost never make them internally, and now they’re invaluable, even in (or especially in) an agile process.
I have half a mind to stop showing wireframes to clients ever. I can hear our UX department freaking out. Ha. Don’t worry. I’m too old to be that radical. But it’s tempting.
