
Validate product design ideas with wireframes - smccade
https://www.simonmccade.com/blog/validate-product-design-ideas-with-wireframes
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narak
Reading the book Creative Selection [1], by an early iPhone software engineer
describing the development of the software keyboard, cemented my existing
belief in working demos over wireframes.

A lot of what makes some UI great over others is little details in interaction
design (subtle animations), color choices, typography, and live content that
is very difficult to replicate in wireframes. Users have an emotional response
to UI and that's what you want to "measure". Next to impossible to do that
with static wireframes. I think all great UI designers should be able to code
their designs, gone are the days of separate photoshop/indesign -> code steps,
at least until the UI matures.

That said, wireframes are a great tool during product ideation and design. I
like paper+pencil as a wire framing tool, and then go straight to working UI.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-
Proc...](https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Process-
ebook/dp/B079DVT6VP/)

~~~
AmericanChopper
You can make great wireframes on paper, but it doesn’t scale very well. Get
more than one person working on it, and more than a few pages and you start
running into trouble. I worked on one complete travesty of a project once
where the core requirements were 100 pages of stapled together, doodle covered
wireframes that were passed around the office for months.

~~~
narak
Agreed, which is why I think going to version controlled, working UI code ASAP
is key. Also my views are for super early UI design and development. For a
mature UI like existing Uber or Airbnb app where larger teams (more than a
couple people) are designing each little piece, makes sense to have more steps
in the process and tooling like Figma to support it.

