Interactive Wireframing

This stage is about analyzing how individual pages will relate to each other, what tasks typical users will perform and how they will interact with your site. Typical tasks may include browsing, registering, purchasing, searching. Outlining the process of tasks’ completion offers another opportunity to take a glance at the site from a user perspective and allows early usability investigation.

As part of interactive wireframing process we will create personas, construct user scenarios and define key user paths to show how typical visitors might use your site.

Personas are user profiles, fictitious characters representing personal characteristics and goals of your typical site visitors.

Scenarios are situations. User scenarios place personas in actual situations on the site. Building a variety of scenarios within the site will take you through several possible tasks, each guiding the user down a different path. If these paths are too convoluted the user may abandon the task.

Defining key user paths is very useful if your site requires users to do anything task oriented (e.g. fill out a form, make a purchase). The goal is to simulate specific paths that a typical user would take when performing a task. If you want your audience to make a purchase you don't want to push them through a dozen screens. In defining user pathways, interactive wireframing is a perfect technique for analysis and solution. It helps making the site structure user centered and increases the likelihood of user finishing the task.