Building a house properly is similar to building a website with a user centered design process in mind. I get a lot of questions of “What is the difference between a wireframe and design?” I think explaining it in terms of building a house makes a lot of sense.
1) Your design is like the interior decoration of the house. Your wireframe is the structure of your house. A wireframe is essentially a blueprint of your website. Imagine an architect waking up one day and says “let’s build a house for you!” without any blueprints or strategic planning? Wireframes are not only the blueprints of your website, they provide strategic direction for many elements such as interior design as well as future direction or layout of your house.
2) Your furniture is like the content of your website. Depending on how many pieces of furniture you have, the architect will design the layout of the website based on the content inventory. The way you lay out a website differs when there are 500 products versus 5 products that must be put in one page.
3) Requirements gathering with real users are crucial in every website build. Imagine building a house and after it’s constructed and polished, the family moves in. Two weeks later, you receive a call from the family informing you that you made a beautiful 3-story home without any elevators. One of the primary family members is in a wheelchair and you failed to interview the family to understand their needs. This would be the equivalent to building your website without talking to your users. To find out AFTER you’ve rebuilt the website that your users actually needed something very crucial that you did not think of is not the position you want to be in. Not only will you have frustrated users, it could have a significant impact on your bottom line. This is why user feedback during the discovery & elaboration phase is essential.
4) Correctly categorizing your navigation is similar to putting the right furniture in the right rooms. You would probably never put a toilet in the middle of your kitchen so why put content that might not be suited for a particular category?
5) Lastly, painting your house is similar to the branding for your website. Choosing the right colors will bring out the right brand you would like to present to your audience. Make sure you use the paint for your house wisely!
