What to ask your agency about wireframing

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on wireframing, these questions are worth asking early.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Wireframes settle structure before anyone argues about colour. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

An hour of wireframing saves a week of redesign. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

In practice

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Three things worth confirming about wireframing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Wireframes settle structure before anyone argues about colour — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.