Stephen Turbek is an Executive Director at Morgan Stanley, focusing on usability and information architecture. Previously, he was at Avenue A | Razorfish for 10 years as a User Experience Director focusing on Financial Services clients.

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“Real people don’t understand wireframes

Usability tests are done to get early feedback on content and functionality decisions from people outside the project team. These participants, unfortunately, are not sure how to respond to a wireframe. It is not intuitively clear what they should be doing, which site they are looking at (public site, intranet, client site)—it may not even be clear that they are looking at a web page. This lack of information and context adds a bit of cognitive friction to each step in the process. This level of confusion results in less confident answers and fewer opinions.”

Real Wireframes Get Real Results - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design