Square pegs and round holes: The pitfalls of starting a project with wireframes
A client, team or department within your organisation come to you because they need a new website, service or platform built. How often do you see product leads or visual designers excitedly fire up Sketch, Axure or InVision and start throwing around carousels, accordions and image galleries? Before they know anything about user needs or the content that needs to be delivered, some bright spark is convinced they know exactly what needs to be built. They have a vision in their head and they’re imagining the praise they’ll get for bringing it to life.
Fast forward a month or two and your product lead is moaning that content hasn’t been delivered or has been delivered incorrectly. It’s all wrong and it’s delaying their wonderful, ego-massaging vision being brought to life.
I see this play out with heartbreaking regularity and it makes me die inside every time.
Start with users, start with content.
If you start a project with wireframes, or any other kind of visual prototype, you are prioritising your own ego over the needs of your users. You are assuming that you know what your users need and how it should be delivered.
This is the equivalent of an architect building a house for a client without first speaking to them to learn what they require.
“You have 4 cars? Oh. The garage I built for you only has space for 2.”
“You have friends coming to stay often? Sorry, no guest rooms. Could they sleep in the bathroom?”
Such a scenario would never happen. If it did, the architect wouldn’t be getting paid. So why does it continue to happen so often when we’re designing websites and digital services? And even more worringly, it happens consistently in organisations that claim to be focused on their users.
We must stop making assumptions.
You are not your user. You don’t know what needs to be delivered.
How would a qualified architect have approached this project? I’m quite sure we all know, even if we have no experience of house building. They would have spent time speaking with their client (the user) to learn exactly what they needed from their new house.
“You have 4 cars? OK, great. Let’s make sure we build a garage that’s big enough.”
“You have friends and family coming to stay often? So let’s make sure we build a number of spacious guest rooms.”
“Your husband has limited mobility? We should make sure there’s a bathroom on the ground floor and the shower should be a walk-in.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. Now our architect knows what he has to build in order to deliver a house that meets his client’s needs.
Before design patterns and components, UX is about people.
Any digital project should start with the same approach. Before you even think about wireframing or prototyping, you need to get out and speak with your users. What problems do they have? What questions are they trying to answer? What tasks are they trying to complete? What are their needs and what content do you need to create to meet those needs?
Once you know what you need to do to meet those needs you can craft content to meet them. Only after you’ve done that can you start thinking about the best way of visually presenting that content.
There is a better way.
Without first knowing your content, a wireframe is an assumption and a wild guess. If you start with a wireframe before anything else, you will be pre-defining boxes into which content must be wrestled and shoehorned. Your users will not thank you.
Reign in your visual designers. Tell them to hold their horses. Get out there and speak to your users, define their needs. Write acceptance criteria so you can focus on creating content that meets those needs.
Create a draft of your content, test it on users. Tweak it, iterate it until it clearly and unambiguously delivers the information they need. Now, you can think about wireframes, page layouts and the best methods of visual presentation. And guess what? Now you have your content, it won’t be holding your project up at the end.
Content-first design is a win for everyone. It lets you deliver exactly what your users need and it delivers better value for your organisation because projects run smoother. What is stopping you from adopting a content-first approach? Only ego and stubbornness can get in the way. If you see it from members of your team or organisation, challenge it. We’re not designing your vision, we’re designing for our users.
