Title: Wireframes are dead, long live rapid prototyping
Context: Prototypes may be harder to make, but do they make a UX designer’s job easier in the long run?
Synopsis: As software design becomes more complex and time to market becomes ever quicker with each iteration, the pressure points in the product development lifecycle invariably increases at the UX design stage. While there are many reasons for this, we have to be fair and ask ourselves if part of the pain is be due to our own design processes and documentation practices. Keeping pace with the momentum of a project may require us to streamline our output in order to bridge the gap between ideation and realization with a working explanation in the form of a prototype rather than the traditional explicit instruction of the spec document. Of course this requires we UX designers to be the ones to adapt at the conceptual phase of the product workflow and to think in temporal terms about our output, not just in static pixels. But hey, UX designers showing flexibility to make other people’s lives easier is par for the course, right?
Best Bit: “If wireframes are so flawed what’s the alternative? Simple, the alternative is to bypass wireframes altogether and either go straight from sketch / outline designs to developing working code (in an Agile fashion), or as is more use common use a rapid prototyping tool to create a prototype.”
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