I use house analogies a lot when explaining UX at my start-up. For example:
- Wireframes are like blueprints for a house.
- The website is like our front lawn. It’s the first thing people see. It gets outdated without care. But we can’t spend all our time on the lawn, because we’re also building plumbing and putting up walls of the house (the product). So we allocate time every couple of weeks to mow the lawn/maintain the website.
This is why I fell in love with Tamara Zilovic’s portfolio. She comes from an architecture background, and it shows in her UX artifacts — her wireframes, journey maps, and even affinity diagrams.
The advantage of making UX artifacts look like architectural blueprints is that most people have a mental model of buildings and blueprints. They see a blueprint and they instantly understand it is a blueprint.
Also, architectural blueprints are freaking gorgeous:
Anyhow, I was inspired by Tamara as well as Steffan Morris Hernandez’s minimal style.
So I did some riffs off of their work:
Wireframes
Journey map
Service map
Affinity diagram
Summary
Putting care and craftsmanship into every step of our process helps convey the thought and substance behind our research and ux work.
As my boss/mentor said to me, substance+beauty wins. When we put thought and substance into our work, and then also make it as beautiful as we can — this is what cuts through the digital noise around us.
