Since a few years we started to produce a different type of deliverable. The wireframes we used to love needed a revamp because they were becoming an art-piece themselves. More and more attention went towards the layout of the user interface and the documentation became too “real”. This became a problem for our visual designers because our intended “perishable” document became a “paint by number” instruction that the designers needed to follow. Our Interaction Design layout “suggestions” were leading the design into boring functional interfaces and this was a problem.
One of the triggers to reinvent our way of working was the realisation that the core of Interaction Design is to focus on process and content. The "Pixel Perfect" dream we all had, was long gone and the new goal became to guide the solution in every variation and context, not to define it for one single static use case. The good ‘old wireframes just weren’t the right tool to keep up with the changing technologies. The responsive and dynamic requirements forced us to rethink what is the truly needed to spark the visual and technical implementation process.
The new deliverable is called a “Priority guide” and is basically a hierarchy of content, organised to serve a specific goal in a certain state of an interface. These guides are connected through several user flows and provide a fist setup for the right HTML semantics. Basically it’s a wireframe without the layout element and now focusses on real content and hierarchy.
With this solution we can design for much more context variations, and in general we can achieve a much better understanding of why certain content is needed in what situation; Interaction Design at it’s finest!
Image source