Wires don’t have to be ugly…

Refining the big picture business requirements

Once the business requirements are initiated from product owners and BA’s. UX is brought in to consume the high level requirements and add user experience best practices and research to the requirements as needed. The practice helps solidify the concept for both business and development, from the written word to a high level visual representation of the applications eco system so to speak.

Refining the chosen happy path and what feature first!

Once everyone is on the same page another level of granularity is established.  For example you may mention in the first iteration “choose a license” in this phase you may break down the different licenses a user can consume – and what happens after that.  So in the end there is an entire flow on user license consumption, and what happens after that at still a fairly high level.  This phase may also discover features that may be added to the project scope.

Wire-framing and prototyping

I used a combination of white boarding, illustrator and acrobat to create comprehensive UX click through wires/comps. Depending on time the wires will establish where things live in the layout as well as a certain amount of style. In an agile environment there really is not enough time to establish clear wires vs clear comps. It’s something in the middle thus UX/UI practice. However, enough for business and development to understand what we are building. it’s an iterative process the final release may not be the ultimate release but a working version of the application.

Sorting out complex experience flows

Here we were refining a application feature integration that worked to integrate active directory users from outside client companies.  After spending days deciphering our application engineers theoretical way on achieving the feature – I had to make it make sense to business and development as well as QA so they knew how to test it.  It was a real challenge and well received.  A funny story with these flows – we had an important meeting in which the architects were explaining to business how ADFS would be integrated and work with our platform.  After an hour the ADFS Single Wizard Flow was shown to business and they finally said oh!  Now we get it!  Flows are critical in communicating complex feature integration, for those that don’t have PHD’s in application design. 

Interaction flows

Sometimes depending on what frameworks your team is working on – how something works is yet another level of granularity designing.  Shown below is a part of how we where establishing sorting switching from data line item rows to cards.  Questions and research were around pagination or infinite scroll.  Multi-select was now also on the table.  If users are sorting they are

UI, typography, and iconography

I like to work on the layout before it gets to the comp stage.  In an agile fast past production cycle you should be about 80% solid on the layout in general.  This is more or less the time to start tightening the composition and creating or adhering to corporate brand standards.

It’s an iterative journey…