Sergio Nouvel: Ditch Traditional Wireframes

Sergio Nouvel, writing for UX Magazine, about ‘Hi-Fidelity Wireframes.’

This is what most people have in mind when they think of wireframes: a carefully crafted blueprint, which is usually true-to-size and incorporates the highest level of detail previous to the final visual comp. In other words, this is a final comp, minus the look and feel, color palette, and fonts.

Sizes, whitespaces, margins, proportions, and line-heights are considered in this kind of wireframing, usually produced in a precision tool such as Fireworks, Illustrator, or OmniGraffle. This document is ready to be dressed by the visual designer with textures and branding.

“Dressed?” Dressed? You could of course substitute the word ‘decorated’ because that’s what design is reduced to in a so-called UX, bullshit, workflow where this kind of wireframes play a role.

I’m not arguing with Sergio though. This is a great article. Not only should you read, if you work with someone who spends hours in tools like Axure, you should print it out and staple it to their head.