This morning I came across an article posted on Twitter titled, "Wireframes are dead, long live rapid prototyping"  My response was "This claim is idiotic." Here's why:

"I don't think that word means what you think it means..."

To the author's credit, he's talking about wireframes the artifact. His claim is that creating another set of documents between designer's sketches and a prototype to take to testing is cumbersome and not well suited for the growing demand of Agile UX design process. There are multiple problems with this claim:

  • Wireframes (the artifact) are generally the best way to show managers and other non-technical stake holders what is actually going to be happening quickly and cheaply. They're also a great reference for "how does this work again?" style questions for designers and developers building a piece of software. Do you really want to have to pull up a prototype and navigate through it to see what it is you need to know? This is like saying, "you don't need the book, you can just watch the movie."
  • Functional prototypes take longer to make. Applications like Axure and Balsamiq still generate wireframes, they just let you also string them together in a semi-interactive way. This isn't new, exciting methodology, we've been doing this with powerpoint  and wireframes for years. Going to this kind of functional prototype from polished wireframes documents is a trival task as far as resource allocation goes.
  • Designer's sketches are not often sufficient as an artifact to communicate the designer's intent. That's why we have comps and wireframes, not because they're just really fun to make or to justify our existence. It's the best way to get what's in our head into the heads of other people.
These problems aside, the bigger problem with this claim that "Wireframes are dead!" is that many don't distinguish between wireframes the artifact and wireframing as a sketching/ideating method. In a blog titled "UX for the masses" I would expect the author to be clearer about which thing he's actually talking about. I know there is confusion here because I've seen and participated in the discussion on Twitter about it this morning. "You don't need wireframes anymore, you can just sketch and then build a prototype" That's true you can. But that doesn't mean there isn't any wireframing, it just means there isn't a formal wireframe document.

Wireframes are to UIs as storyboards are the feature films, they're the road map. They tell you roughly how things are going to play out and what's supposed to be happening. Just like storyboards they're quick and cheap to make, that's why they exist. To go to the kind of "functional prototypes" that Axure or Balsamiq or the like are providing isn't saving any time or killing wireframes, the work is still being done, the method is still being used. It doesn't matter if you print them out and put them in a binder or not.