[Sigia-l] strategy to mocking wireframes?

[tom smith]

On Sunday, April 13, 2003, at 08:34 AM, Eric Scheid wrote:

> What's your experience with constructing wireframe mockups? How do you 
> know
> whether it should be use-case driven or info-map driven? How do you 
> balance
> those competing needs for the ambiguous cases? Are the two drivers, 
> usage
> vs. info, more often in alignment or in competition?

One "it depends" is whether what you are building is content or a 
tools-based system.

I nearly always mockup from a use case perspective. Sometimes, parts of 
the content are wire-framed as examples, but there is normally so much 
similar content that mocking it all up would be repetitive and 
difficult to change if we decided we'd got it wrong.

I guess there's another "it depends" hidden here. In most cases we use 
wire-frames as part of the design process, that is they are used so 
that designers, programmers and other stake-holders can contribute to 
shaping what we are making. We don't normally use wire-frames as an 
exact specification for the programmers and designers to follow.

All of this depends what your team or company is like. If you have to 
specify every last detail, then you are wasting your time doing 
repetitive work. If wire-frames are used purely as specs then your 
designers and programmers probably aren't contributing enough.

tom

p.s I often create documents that are a hybrid of use-cases and site 
map, one minute they look a little like UML, the next they look like 
design sketches, this is because at some points the layout is very 
important and others what happens is important and to me separating 
issues into different documents only makes the communication of ideas 
more fragmented.

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tom smith
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