Last week I was in a meeting with a client and our
architect/tech lead on a website development project. The client
was explaining a newly discovered business requirement we needed to
fold in somehow.
"We sell our products to students," the client was explaining.
"When they come to our site, they can buy some of our products at
student prices, which is, like, half the price of retail. But they
can only buy a maximum of 50 items at student prices. Then we have
to charge them retail price for the rest. Also, the max cap is per
student per month, so if they've already bought some products this
month, you have to factor that in, too."
In technical terms, this is what is known as an "oh, crap!"
moment.
My architect started envisioning custom coding, AJAX
synchronization, business logic algorithms, and data schemas, and
he was thinking: oh, crap, 15 extra hours of coding. I was afraid
his eyes were going to roll up in his head.
So I drew this picture:
Wireframe of product page
The client looked at it and said "Yep, that's what I want."
Our architect looked at it and said, "Huh. OK, that's easy."
The point
Wireframes are a fundamental part of The Nimble Method, our
unique methodology that allows us to promise to deliver projects on
time, on budget and on target. Emphasis on
target.
Time and time again clients have told us: Skip the user
experience requirements. Wireframes are a luxury they can't afford,
they say. It'll take too long and cost too much.
Yet in this simple example, how much time did we save? It took
me 15 minutes to draw this wireframe in Visio. In a traditional
Waterfall process, it would have taken 15 hours to define &
approve the requirements in a Change Control document, or in an
Agile process, it would have taken 15 hours to code a
prototype.
Moral of the story: A picture really is worth a
thousand words, whether the words are in English (business
requirements), or in C# (code).