Creating a wireframe - Low fidelity - hand drawn.

In this video, we're going to look at doing wireframes, but we're going to do some low fidelity, hand drawn ones. I always start with this, I draw on my book and start working that way, and often, if it's my own work I don't get any further than this, I don't mock up beautiful ones in Illustrator because there's no point, there's no one to impress but myself, and it's a bit of ideation, this wireframing, and I work from those. But if you are going to be sending it to the clients, it would be weird to turn out with just hand drawn ones, you want to sex it up a little bit using Illustrator to make your wireframes look really good.

Let me go show you how I do it with just my hand drawn ones first, and then, in the next video we'll do Illustrator.

In terms of the wireframes, this is the kind of level that we're looking at. These are wireframe, wireframe... let's have a look. Some other wireframes, some other things, and bits, you can see the level of them, it's just to get ideas down, sometimes I put a bit more into them but not much. They're ones I like, it's kind of at this level.

Now, would I deliver this to the client? Say I'm working in a process where I've been hired as a UX consultant, and I'm going in with wireframing, I put in a little bit more effort into it, not a huge amount. What I don't want to do is-- I've had discussions when I go abroad on Photoshop mockups, and it's the time to talk about the basic features and layout, where people have started picking colors, and picking fonts, "Oh I don't like the font, or, you can't call it that." so keep the language out, use squiggly text lines, so people can get a really good sense of it, but without getting into too much detail.

And if you're super special, you might get a little bit of color. Look, highlighting. But that's about it, that's my wireframes and that really works for me in terms of ideas. 

The other thing is that don't just do one wireframe, you get in your features list, you start adding them into here, and don't just do one wireframe, I find I need to do five. Even if your first one-- you do this one, that was cool. Then the second one, then the third, then the fourth one, and it's not to get a few through into them, that you actually kind of work out a few bugs, because you might go, “Yeah, that's great,” and you force yourself to do a second one, you know it's crap, because you're kind of "That was the good one." Then you're on the third one, you're like, "Oh geez, I'm going through the process." But I know, often, when I do all five, and I force myself to, number three is the one. If you had stopped at number two, you would never have got that amazing layout for number three. So force yourself to go through and do some more, more than just one layout.