Wireframes, also known as a blueprints or model designs, are visual guides, outlines, which represent the simplified model of an object, state, or workflow being described. Essentially, wireframes are created for the purpose of arranging elements to best accomplish a particular purpose. They usually lack typographic style, color, or graphics, since the main focus lies in functionality, behavior, and priority of content. In other words, they focuses on functionality, not appearance. Wireframes can be pencil drawings or sketches on a whiteboard, or they can be produced by means of a broad array of free or commercial software applications.
But… chances are you probably already knew all this.
In addition to their core purpose, wireframes have an additional and wider meaning:
Wireframes provide means of easily expressing oneself and collaboration with people who have joined around the same idea but are approaching it from different perspectives.
For example, let’s consider the usual business scenario we often encounter here at Merit Solutions: a company has a business process that wants supported by a mobile app. We have multiple groups of people involved in this scenario: project sponsors, subject matter experts (SMEs), end users, project managers, business consultants, and development (DEV) and QA teams. They all aim towards the same goal, but the goal is perceived differently by each group: project sponsors want to increase revenue and performance, SMEs want the business process to be improved, users want simplicity, business consultants clarity and consistency, DEV needs the translation to something suitable for them to build on and QA wants to maintain the quality standard of the delivered solution.
This complex collaboration usually starts with analysis and the gathering of requirements which end up collected in a document. Our experience teaches us that this can be quite inefficient and slow process.
Often the information on the business process gets misinterpreted, remains incomplete or details get missed out. Even more often project sponsors and SMEs are not aware of what they exactly want.
Since the writing of the document can take time, and the design and development even more, there is a fair amount of risk that comes with this approach, mainly because of the mentioned issues, but also due to the fact that the technology and needs change over time. Wireframes can have a huge impact on the mitigation of this risk.
The following qualities of wireframes are making it an excellent choice for collaboration:
- They are easy to draw and as such they save time.
- They are easy to understand as they are visualizing the idea.
- They eliminate the level abstraction that sits between the ones unique perspective and commonly understood representation as each component is illustrated – they are tangible.
- They can store more details than text.
- They are efficient and consistent.
- They are easy to grasp, improve communication and collaboration between the team members, regardless of which team they belong to.
- Quite often, the tools for the development of wireframes are online and free.
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