Tent Talks Featuring: Billy Carlson, Leon Barnard, & Michael Angeles

Introducing Wireframing to Everyone: Wireframing is a technique often reserved for designers, but a new approach seeks to make it accessible to everyone, including product people, developers, managers, entrepreneurs, and non-designers. The goal is to teach these individuals not only to visualize business concepts but to understand the entire process of user experience (UX) design and the importance of human-centered design.

The Value of Wireframing: The value of wireframing for non-designers lies in its ability to explore and test ideas early on. Wireframes are easy to create and discard, allowing teams to find the best ideas without fear of wasting resources. The goal is to teach more than just the use of evolving tools; it's about mastering essential skills and techniques.

Essential Skills in Wireframing: These essential skills include fostering a fearless approach to visualizing ideas and championing the process itself. A basic understanding of user interface (UI) design is needed, but the focus is on simplicity and understanding the iterative process.

Wireframing’s Evolution: The wireframing approach has evolved over time, with core concepts remaining constant even as technology advances. Even with opportunities in AR, VR, and AI, the basic "gray boxing" in VR remains the same. While AI may be embedded in future tools, wireframing's core will remain unaffected.

Challenges in Teaching Wireframing: Teaching wireframing presents challenges, especially in shifting the mindset of non-designers to what designers actually do. It isn't just about making things look nice; it's about asking the right questions and keeping the user in mind. The emphasis should be on the process rather than the end product.

Tools and Techniques: Various tools such as Visio, Balsamiq, and others are available for wireframing, but the trend is towards tools focusing on techniques rather than features. The approach to wireframing should be seen as a phase where anything is possible, a platform to generate many ideas to find the best one.

Conclusion: Overall, the theme of the book is clear: Wireframing isn't about complex drawing or design skills. It's about understanding and championing a process that leads to effective, human-centered designs. The tools and techniques are means to that end, and the intention is to simplify and demystify that process for a broader audience, making wireframing a technique for everyone.

Chicago Camps hosts irregularly scheduled Tent Talks with people from all across the User Experience Design community, and beyond. Who really likes limits, anyway--If it's a cool idea, we'd love to hear about it and share it!

What is a Tent Talk? That's a great question, we'd love to tell you.

Tent Talks are short-form in nature, generally lasting from 10-20 minutes (ish) in a recorded format--we like to think of them as "S'mores-sized content" because that's pretty on-brand. Tent Talks can be a presentation on a topic, a live Q&A session about the work we do, or the work around the work we do, or really just about anything--we don't want to limit ourselves, or you.

You should send along an idea or topic of your own so we can learn from you, as well! You don't have to be a published author or a professional speaker on a circuit to be good at your job, so please, put yourself forward, and let's have some fun, talk, and share your experience with others!