I have noticed in my experience that often the “Wireframing” stage in the design process is often overlooked by designers and developers, and I have personally been guilty of this in the past as I did not quite understand the merit of it at the time. With experience I have re-evaluated and developed my design process, and realising the best way to succeed is to plan. Wireframing is arguably one of the most important stages in the planning of any project. Wireframing allows the designers to unleash their creative thinking and allow others to visualise how the interface may not only look but also how the user can interact with it (UX), helping others to foresee any complications.

Rapid Iterations

Once you have setup a template for your wireframes, its very easy to produce quick wireframes with boxes and shaded areas to represent placement of content in the interface. With loads of iterations of wireframes it allows the designers to consider all possible ideas quickly and include it to test to see what fits the best.

Sharing is Caring

By producing wireframes, it allows others such as developers and clients become involved in the design process at a very early stage. With their involvement they can help shape the design to help suit the client, and allow the developer to see what is possible and what will not work.

It’s Cheap

It’s cheap for a lot of reasons but there are two major reasons why its cheap. All you need to produce a wireframe is a pen and sketchbook. Another reason is it can save you money in the long run. By involving it early in the planning stages of the build you will be able to save from future complications and will cost you time and money.

Focuses on Content

Wireframing takes the focus off the color and the aesthetics of the interface, and forces the designer to focus the placement of the content, and places an emphasis on what the content is as it will shape the design.

Paper Prototyping

Paper Prototyping is one of the best methods in getting feedback on usability issues and especially an opportunity to involve the user at a very early stage of the design process. Its so simple and quick to work with Paper Prototypes although they its not the same as live testing on the correct platform, but at the planning stages this method can help guide your designs.

Client Engagement

Wireframing presents the opportunity to share your ideas to the client, and for them to offer feedback and share their own ideas. This is a brilliant way to engage the client at the beginning of the process and will lead to the likelihood of the client signing off on the design.

Download iPad Wireframe Template for Illustrator

Dear Mr. Brian Eno, if you do happen to fall across this web page, we’ll be contacting you shortly. Over the past month I have been working and developing on the User Interface (UI) design of the very first application built by DubbleTap.

DubbleTap — we build apps

DubbleTap is a tiny iPhone & Web Development studio based in Belfast. It is a collaborative project by two Multidisciplinary Design students, Brian Burns and Danny Turley. We have several app ideas in the pipeline, that we are hoping to roll out next year, so watch this space…

What is Oblique Strategies?

For those of you who have not heard of Oblique Strategies before — just as I was only a month ago, I have taken a quote from the interview with Mr. Brian Eno about Oblique Strategies:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios – tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn’t the case – it’s just the most obvious and – apparently – reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.”

The first Oblique Strategy said “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” And, in fact, Peter’s first Oblique Strategy – done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that – was …I think it was “Was it really a mistake?” which was, of course, much the same kind of message. Well, I collected about fifteen or twenty of these and then I put them onto cards. At the same time, Peter had been keeping a little book of messages to himself as regards painting, and he’d kept those in a notebook. We were both very surprised to find the other not only using a similar system but also many of the messages being absolutely overlapping, you know…there was a complete correspondence between the messages. So subsequently we decided to try to work out a way of making that available to other people, which we did; we published them as a pack of cards, and they’re now used by quite a lot of different people, I think.

Brian Eno, interview with Charles Amirkhanian, KPFA-FM Berkeley, 2/1/80

Pen and Paper

My iPhone Stencil Kit came in handy and was fun to use when I started my design process off with some paper mockups. When starting any new project, I believe it is essential to start the design process off with some old pen and paper, whether it may be simply making some notes, brainstorming, or sketching — it really does focus your thinking, and helps develop your ideas.

The UI

User Interaction Flow

Feedback

If you any thoughts or comments, I would really like to hear them and to get some feedback on User Interface of Oblique Strategies would be great! Thanks

Yesterday, I did a Presentation on the Intelligence of Interaction as part of our coursework for the Design Thinking module. My task was to take a single design object — iPhone and look at theory by Nicholas Negroponte on User Interaction. Most of my research was based on Negroponte’s book, Being Digital, and a video of him on TED.

Brainstorming

Slides

I had originally agreed with Joseph if I could postpone my Presentation on 17th November to the following week — 24th November, as I had a plan to be at an iPhone training course. Unfortunately, the course was postponed to the following week, so it was best for me to present on the original date.

Assignment – Presentation

The assignment was to take a single design object, and discuss it in terms of theoretical reading. The Presentation to be between 10 – 15 mins, accompanied with a 500 word written statement.

Interaction v’s Packaging

Joseph had simplified the process for me, and told me that he was looking for one theory, and one object. I was very interested in working with a theory of “Intelligence of Interaction” by Nicholas Negroponte. I was also interested in the role of packaging, and looking at Adrian Forty on the Lucky Strike redesign by Raymond Loewry.

Action Agreed

To either take Interaction or Packaging, and find one theory and one object for the 10 minute presentation.

It was great to finally get talking to Joseph McBrinn about the two assessments. I really did not what to do for each assignment, and was good to talk to Joseph as I was finding a lot of the reading material very difficult to comprehend. Although I did notice that from reading the difficult texts, I found reading other material to be much easier and my overall understanding was improving.

Assignments

For the first assignment we discussed about looking into the theory of designers such as Nicholas Negroponte, and Don Norman and apply the emotional design and the how we will interact with touch sensitive screens.

For the second assignment I will have to look more so at the area of my practice — iPhone Development, and we talked about:

• Look at the bigger picture how does the iPhone affect the way we interact with the world.
• If stranded on a beach would an iPhone be one of the 3 objects you would take with you?
• In 9 months Apple have reached over 1 Billon iPhone App sales, and how can this effect the economic values of the world and its competitors.
• The pros and cons of the iPhone device.
• The possible effect of the much anticipated Mac Tablet have on the consumer market?

Action Agreed

We agreed to start looking at different theories by individuals such as Nicholas Negroponte, and Don Norman, and how these theories can be applied to the object — iPhone.

Firstly, we began our tutorial session with me showing Nicklas Persson my new personal website and blog. I had developed the new site in HTML 5 and CSS3, so was quite interested to hear what Nicklas thoughts of the design and code of the new site. He was able to give me some pointers to more or less optimise the site further, with changing the images to PNG-24, and adding some whitespace to the overall design of the site.

We also discussed whether to stay with Cufon for the font rendering or to experiment with @font-face, but then we discussed the licensing issues with both approaches, and the downside of image replacement for screen readers.

Nicklas had an Oblique Strategies App on his iPhone, but for some reason that application is no longer available on the App Store. Nick had passed on the information of the company responsible for the application (Far Out Labs), and agreed it was a good idea to contact them, to find out the reasons why the application was pulled.

Sketchbook of Apps

Towards the end of the tutorial session, Nick suggested that I should have a sketchbook of iPhone Apps, just rough sketches just to get some concepts down on paper, and it didn’t matter if the application concept was weak that it would be a good experimentation to go through the process. I remember looking at the Things Blog when I was doing some research for my Major Project last year, and this is a great visual tool for getting those ideas out on paper and develop the concept further. Also a great excuse to use iPhone Stencil Kit .

Action Agreed

We agreed to contact Far Out Labs, in regards to the reason(s) why their version of Oblique Strategies is no longer available on the App Store. To add some minor touches to the design and code of the new website, and to continue reading.

Friday 9th October, I had my 2nd Tutorial with Chris Murphy, and fellow Masters student Mr Brian Burns, as we discussed setting up a new venture together under the name of DubbleTap. We talked about the strategic planning of DubbleTap, and a few potential iPhone Apps that we would like to develop down the line. In particular we agreed to start building our first App based on Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

Action Agreed

We agreed that my role would be the iPhone Developer, and by week 6 to have a working prototype of the Oblique Strategies App. That gives me 3 weeks to finish my reading on Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, and to start building my first iPhone App. Looking forward to the challenge, and with the development of DubbleTap we can let you know more about what we are doing, and how we are doing it.

As part of our Design Thinking module, Joseph, Chris and Debbie organised the whole class for a field trip to London, to visit the V & A Museum, The Design Museum and The Tate Modern. It was a great day out, and it was a new experience for me as it opened my mind to the context of design, and to get me away from the laptop for awhile.

I took some photos of the exhibitions on my iPhone:

V & A Museum (6 Photos)

The Design Museum (11 Photos)

My first week back as a student after graduating from Interactive Multimedia Design (IMD), I had my first tutorial of the new course as a Multidisciplinary Design student, with Lecturer Chris Murphy. Chris already knew a lot about what I was looking to do on the course, iPhone Development and User Experience research.

Recommended Reading

During the tutorial, Chris recommended that I should read Don Norman’s book on “The Design of Everyday Things”, as a good starting point to help me improve my skill sets in relation to the User Experience (UX) Design. So I have ordered my copy from Amazon and waiting for delivery.

Over the Summer

Chris had encourage me to over the summer months to start doing some background reading on the technical side of iPhone Development, and I came across a great post on 43 iPhone Development Resources. The number one resource on the list was a book on Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche – http://iphonedevbook.com/. Another book Chris recommended that I read over the summer was a book by 37 Signals, called Getting Real. So far I have thoroughly enjoyed reading both books, one from a more technical viewpoint and the other more about the process.

Action Agreed

At the end of the tutorial, the action agreed was over the next few weeks was to continue to read Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, Getting Real and Don Norman’s book on “The Design of Everyday Things”.