In reply to the medium article:
Wireframes are becoming less relevant — and that’s a good thing by Sean Dexter
Hi Sean. Interesting observations! I wanted to understand where you are coming from and visiting your profile on LinkedIn doesn’t help me much. What would you call yourself? A UXD, Product Manager, AR/VR Creative Lead or a Do-it-All person. Pardon me for trolling you, the idea is just to understand where you are coming from.
For argument’s sake, I am assuming you worked extensively with UXDs, VDs, Biz and Developers. But, if I have to think that Product Manager is what you brand yourself, I am finding it hard to accept that User Experience and Wireframe (which is a deliverable of UX) is becoming less relevant!
Let me give an example if I understand correctly where you are coming from.
As a Product Manager, you get business requirement, analyse them, may be create a few persona (Oops no! that’s still UX), Journey Maps (Umm…Useless but might be helpful although UX stinks), discuss with technical team and perhaps a rough taskflow(that’s not UX I think) and decide to skip wireframe. So, to get to the fastest way from A to B you, with your experience choose a platform Magento(Or Joomla, Salesforce or anything else) as you are tasked to sell a product. Now, who needs a wireframe? Selling technique is same, steps are same, it does not vary from Amazon to Walmart to Aliexpress to some random Mom and Pop store selling lollypops online.
Now, to impress the biz, fastest way (faster than wireframe) would be to create something that the business can play along. And either of this platform mentioned above, will take not more than 2–24 hrs to setup, put a logo and get going! And then, as you show the business, they can share their inputs and you can plugin stuff as you go. Right? As practicing UXD and Interaction Designer of 14+years of experience, I would say this right, or at least acceptable!
But for a small business only!
For a very small business who is struggling to go online in the lowest amount of time possible, this methodology works. But, with a Business which already has brand reputation or going big (Say from $100m to $200m in a year) this would be a major blunder. As you grow the business, you become more and more careful about the brand. You pick and choose every possible way to satisfy them. You know why most 7 star hotels brand their toilet paper(if that’s going too far, take napkins) with their logo? Because every small element in the experience matters. Every icon you choose, every little button color, every little delay in load, every micro interaction that you add to your website….matters!
Back to our discussion, the cost of creating an experience, choosing or without choosing( I am terrified thinking that the business can make that decision in some org!) a framework would be absolutely a loss of huge amount of money. If nothing, the time UXDs will take to create and refine the wireframe will make the business think a thousand more times as their wishlist for new features grow. Every random details that you think wire-frames are useless for will come back multiplied by huge $ value if not thought through properly.
But I agree not all the business are patient enough to understand that and it’s a lot easier to grab a page from a template-factory website and start development on Day1 than waiting. You have to remember the purpose of web has become so specialized that the templates have become a norm for brochure websites and services. Actual UX happens when both the business and the Product Manager values empathy. Organizational level deep thinks, design thinking workshops and a lot in between would be required to build a world class product. And UX will still remain LEAN as we user test our early version.
Core Intensity 