I attended the latest IxDA DC event and listened to Todd Zaki Warfel present his InterVu research framework.

As information architects, we sometimes take wireframes for granted. We work with them every day. We live and breathe boxes and lorem ipsum placeholder text. What we don't often realize is that many people that we work with don't really grasp the concept of wireframing as it relates to web design. Often times, clients would just like to see a page mocked up in Photoshop and sink their teeth into a full-fledged design.

My last two posts have centered around prototyping methods. Since I talked a bit about techniques, I thought it would be helpful to show an example in practice that we have used for a project I'm currently working on.

Wireframes have been an indispensable tool for information architects to present and communicate the web page layouts and content placement to clients and developers. In revisiting our wireframes templates, I wanted to tackle a couple of issues that have been brought up across the years since I last wrote anything on the matter:

A reader of my last post, Prototyping for the Masses, brought to my attention an online tool used to create simulations of web applications called Simunication. I thought it would be good to add these kinds of tools to my list of prototyping resources.

In a previous post, I talked about the notion of "looking before you leap" as it relates to designing a website. Part of this "looking," or exploration stage, can be enhanced by prototyping.

In a recent training session on Visio, I explained the benefits of using Backgrounds when building wireframes.

Today, during a UX+D presentation to new staff at Forum One, Sophie asked, "what do the dashed lines mean in your sitemap diagrams?" Good question...

Now that I have had a chance to think, I think for me they usually mean a content item that can be listed under two parent nodes. In the end I had to decide where it needed to live, but I wanted to express that I have a strong relationship elsewhere which needs to be captured.

Just created my first Omnigraffle stencil (it's as simple as creating a - smallish - wireframe and saving the extension as .gstencil). You can view it in the following location.

Graffletopia is a great site that is collecting stencils for OmniGraffle.