WireFrame

A wireframe, also known as page architecture, page schematic, or blueprint, is a highly simplified sketch of the important information in a page.

The goal is to reflect the relative importance of different elements, including the content and the navigation.

It is meant to exclude the visual design of the page (the work of a VisualDesigner? ) and show exclusively the organization of the information (the work of an InformationArchitect ).

Unfortunately, the WireFrame often appears to suggest a layout for the content, thus infringing on the work of the designer, and compromising the main mantra of ContentManagement - "separate the layout from the content."

One suggested solution is to make position-agnostic blocks of content that simply show the priority of content and navigation elements, from top to bottom, or left to right, or with nested hierarchies.

A WireFrame is called "flat" when it is a simple non-interactive graphic produced in Photoshop or Visio. Interacting with a flat wireframe consists of asking potential users what they think about it, where they would click to achieve some task is a scenario, etc.

A superior method of wireframing is to build an HTML prototype, which is truly interactive and can link to wireframe designs for secondary pages. HTML wireframes are the tool of choice for InteractionDesign.

References:
IAwiki
HTML wireframes, by Julie Stanford


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