12 Spokes

I am putting together wireframes for the first time in a few months. Lately I’ve only been mapping out internal websites, so the ol’ pen-and-napkin method of IA’s been working just fine, but we have a new client whose needs are best met by clunky ol’ web1.0 wireframes.

Here’s why: The client is actually a group of individual companies who are joining forces to create one big partnership. Getting all the interested parties in the same room seems to be a difficult task, and when everyone does meet, the discussion often breaks and splinters into side-topics of all stripes. There are a lot of voices to be heard, and pens and napkins just won’t work in this situation: there are too many people in the room, all talking at once, and an informal jotting session would be too, um, organic—to put it nicely.

So, we need wireframes, which not only help get everyone on the same page, but do it in an authoritative manner that commands thoughtful discourse rather than fevered, volatile brainstorming.

With that in mind, let me get to my real point: I really hate wireframing. It’s always seemed like a lot of nitpicky moving boxes and arrows around on a page, trying to get each piece in exactly the right place. Anyone who’s wireframed before can tell I’ve been working with Microsoft’s Visio: a program that does the job, but makes the job really painful and laborious. All those hours I spent dragging the mouse cursor so gingerly, trying to get the damn connector line to go straight; all the times I’d try to select a row of nine boxes, and after I’d selected eight, I’d lose the selection—daaarrrgh!

Good news for me: I got a MacBook this week, and installed OmniGraffle, a Mac-specific wireframing tool. I could say it’s equivalent to Visio, but that’s like saying that traveling across the continent by covered wagon is equivalent to flying: they’re both modes of transportation, yeah?

The comparison is apt: I just created a diagram in OmniGraffle that would’ve taken me 30 minutes in Visio. With OmniGraffle, it took three minutes. It is so much smarter than Visio. OmniGraffle knows important things like: “Erin wants her diagrams to be symmetrical, so if little guides appear to let her know when she’s hit a point of symmetry, it’ll save her a lot of fussing and nudging this stupid little box. Even if she doesn’t use those guides all the time, it’s nice for her to know they’re there”. And: “Sometimes Erin wants to apply the same colors, line thicknesses, and fonts to a bunch of boxes. Rather than making her copy and paste a “parent” box, we’ll let her grab the styles from one box and drop them onto any other box she wants. One click, instead of five!”

I’ve had my Mac for 36 hours, and this is my first “Ahhhh, this is so much easier” moment. I’ve been told by other converts that Macs just make everything better, but this is the first time I’ve really understood it. (With the qualification that Apple didn’t write OmniGraffle—but that it is built specifically for OS X and its kickass capabilities.)

And don’t even get me started on the sparkling copy that fills the OmniGraffle manual. It’s a copywriter’s dream.

I’ll leave you with this choice quote from the Wikipedia article about OmniGraffle:

According to former Omni Group president Wil Shipley, Graffle “sort of stands for ‘graph layout’... but in general it was a nonsense word invented just to counter ‘Visio’.