Too much, too soon

In our development process, we typically write brief narratives describing how users will interact with the website or application (user stories), then move right into building a working prototype. But this week I finished up a set of wireframes (a static prototype) to complement the narratives for a project.

I learned at least one important lesson: include only the most necessary details in the prototype at each stage of the development process, focused exclusively on the decisions at hand. Don’t hesitate to discuss other decisions as they come up, but don’t put them into the working model. Why? Additional detail distracts from the primary decisions and wastes time better spent at later stages.

In the wireframe/narrative stage, the critical things to decide are:

1. What general things display on a particular view
2. How those things work

As I look back I see a lot of copy I added that doesn’t matter at this stage. Instead, I should have used a placeholder that noted what would be there (“Benefits list here”). Fortunately, the customer was able to focus on the decisions at hand, but I wouldn’t blame him if he fixated on the choice of copy.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker