Wireframing is an essential part of successful interface design processes. A great interface design does not just appear in one fell swoop. It comes about iteratively through constant refinement. It is about evolution and not revolution! This is where wireframing comes in handy through the traditional Graphical User Interface Design separation of “church and state”. This separation is the differentiation between an interface design’s content and its features, commands and other factors. With the latter, we are talking about layout, navigation, and other processes such as login and checkout. The idea behind wireframing is to test wireframes to ensure usability first, and only then worry about fleshing out the final aesthetics and content. Available to this end are various wireframing tools and the rest of this blog shall be dedicated to comparing a few of them.

The most rudimentary (and cheapest) way of creating wireframes is through the use of pen and paper. Some interface designers are also creating “paper wireframes” through PowerPoint, Fireworks, or Illustrator. Paper prototypes are cheap to create, and software allows you to easily add text, symbols, stencils, and the like as well as employing templates for even more rapid iteration. However, interactive wireframing tools possess the added advantage of interactivity, which opens doors for collaboration between team members and even clients. Furthermore, they engender feedback from all stakeholders and can even go as far as mimicking website functionality (such as clickable links etc.). Interactive wireframing tools usually allow for simple interface design by employing drag-and-drop of pre-fabricated UI components. This means that interface design can be done by virtually anyone without having to know coding. Wireframing tools can be web-based Software-as-a-Software or a native client that you install.
Examples of interactive wireframing tools include Axure, pidoco, Balsamiq and iRise. The wireframes can then be used in usability testing in order to be improved. Usability testing can be done with paper prototypes or digital prototypes.  Digital prototypes often require expensive specialized usability testing software such, but in rare cases (such as pidoco) does a wireframing tool also have the capability to conduct usability testing without the need for additional software.

Another aspect of the UI design that users were attached to was the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. According to TNW’s Alex Wilhelm the new up/down arrows are simply not endearing enough. Worse still, Digg’s less popular competitor Reddit uses arrows, which gives Digg even less reason to incorporate such icons into its new user interface design. Another complaint was the lack of the ‘Upcoming’ news section which lowers “the ability of Digg users to craft the editorial line of the website, in effect neutering the people who tend Digg and give it its character”.

Although the navigation is easier, the default homepage has been changed from ‘Top News’ to ‘My News’. As of writing there is still no way to change that setting. Perhaps with a little time users will come to love the new ‘My News’ page. From a usability perspective, the switch to the Cassandra database management system has been fraught with bugs following massive uptime and reliability problems.  Despite all the protestations Digg’s future, it would seem, is still intact. They have had a number of revolts in the past already. When version 3 of Digg’s user interface design was released they also received a number of complaints from users but over time a lot of the issues were resolved. It will be interesting to see how Digg will react to appease users.

Taking a page out of Greek mythology

Many users have complained about the iPad’s dearth of calling power.  Of course, phone calls CAN be made via the iPad’s user interface (Skype etc.) but the iPad does not provide the same VoIP services as the Galaxy.  So users may be right to complain.  It seems only logical to expect tablets to provide the combined services of computers and mobile phones. Otherwise, tablets may seem like oversized smartphones or awkward, undersized laptops. What is the point of buying a tablet that doesn’t truly do it all?  The Galaxy claims it CAN do it all, and thus is a technological Chimera sent to serve all of our daily needs in one very small package.  Of course don’t get too excited—a chimera is also synonymous with impossible or foolish fantasies, the Galaxy very well could be too good to be true.

But sketching and refining ideas is not the only thing wireframes are good for! With a wireframe you can communicate your ideas and specifications to other stake holders in the project team. And as we all know, programmers speak a completely different language than designers, with a wireframe both parties communicate in a universal language: with animated pictures! The perfect thing about communicating on the basis of a wireframe is that your programmer can really see and experience what you want, ask the right questions and help finding solutions where certain (may be technical) requirements not have been considered (making changes in the concept necessary – lucky me who created a wireframe instead of spending long hours on designing all detailed pages first).