A List Apart: Scope Creep
“…Wireframe” is a simple, text-only skeletal version of the application. It is used as a sort of booster rocket to help us escape the leaden weight of our own assumptions about what clients want. Something magical happens when a client can click on a link. It stimulates their interest and engages their brain. Wireframes that do nothing but tell the client what this page will contain and has links to other pages is ridiculously effective…”
Wow. Good article on scope creep, and it mentioned a very quick prototyping tool for ColdFusion that lets you build pages (basic text only) and auto-link etc etc. There’s a PHP version -I just downloaded it and 10 minutes later it’s up and running – 9 1/2 minutes which were dedicated to buggering about with WSFTP and file permissions. Have a look.
Click ‘edit’ and you’ll see the structure – pages separated by —, titles contained in [], text content in front of the semi-colons and typing in “link = pagetitle” creates a link to that page on the page you’re editing. Now if I could figure a way to get omnioutliner to mate with this, then I could write outlines, and then parse this into a wireframe of a website in minutes flat. As the article says, getting clients to see and click stuff works wonders.
And if you think that’s cool, click ‘History’ – it lets you look at comments and roll back changes, delete revisions etc. Very nifty.
Another point of the article is that clients (i.e. people :-) are only really able to react to stuff. If they knew what they wanted in the first place, why are they hiring us? So, the need to get something, however rough, in front of them (preferably interactive), with the *full* expectation that they’ll want something different would seem a smart idea. At the moment (although I try to produce a visual approximation) my storyboards for clients don’t provide this. I reckon a quick text and click mock-up as part of the initial outline process (i.e. before I even start writing up the boards proper) would actually speed up the whole process of helping the client visualise the content. Food for thought?