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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> The tools get in my way

How on earth are you going to tell the app what you want to draw, if you can't stand even a basic tool palette?

> Too much control: Playing with drop shadows, gradients...

Umm... these are actual very useful features for wireframing, because when you have a lot of black outlines, they help distinguish between elements. How on earth are you complaining about having too many options?!

> Responsive Responsive Responsive

You do realize that it's a helluva lot of work to design responsive layouts, because they can be responsive along any number of dimensions, in different ways? A "simple" wireframing app is going to get it wrong. That's not wireframing. That's mocking your stuff up in HTML in the first place.

Etc, etc...

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> How on earth are you going to tell the app what you want to draw?

Well, one idea would be to have the rectangle tool selected by default. If I want some other shape, click and hold, the menu pops up, select a shape, menu disappears. Draw.

> How on earth are you complaining about having too many options?

I did say in my post that borders would be a help, I think that's what you mean by "black outlines"? I don't want options, I want speed. As a designer, I'm aware of my options when it comes to visual design. I don't need to experiment with each one, I already have a decent idea what will work and what won't. What I do need to experiment with is user flows. For that, I need speed, not options.

> You do realize that it's a helluva lot of work to design responsive layouts

I'm aware of the work involved in designing responsive layouts, I do it everyday. One idea would be to design for mobile first in the wireframing app, then resize the screen, re-arrange the layout and press "insert breakpoint", then a snapshot of that layout would be saved. So the next time the screen reaches that width, the layout changes automatically.

As a 10-year UXer, I totally agree! I was nodding and saying "exactly" out loud throughout the whole article.

People that WANT shadows and details and pre-made stuff like that are the people who want to design the UI in stead of the functional specification. The more experienced you get, the less you want them.

Here is an exhaustive list of every feature I need to make wireframes that you would call beautiful:

- shapes: rectangle, rounded rectangle, circle, triangle, line, arrow

- rectangle with an X in it, representing images

- text in a couple different sizes and two weights (bold & regular)

- a few colors (maybe 5). Shades of gray, red, green, & blue.

That's it. Anything else and you're slowing me down. Seriously.

A tablet with a stylus (eg: ThinkPad Tablet) would work well for that. Just grab it, fire up your drawing app (eg: LectureNotes) and start drawing. You get easy colour selections, box and oval drawing, and full page duplication or element copy/paste.

If you don't want a full tablet just for wireframing, maybe one of those stylus peripherals (eg: Bamboo tablet) would work well.

I'm surprised that you didn't mention element linking though. I would add to your list some feature that allows me to put basic actions onto an element - like a click action opening a new wireframe page.

It would be great to see one of your beautiful wireframes using only those features. Sounds like a great idea for a competition. Most appealing wireframe using the fewest features wins.

I love that competition idea.

For non-drawing features I definitely agree. Linking would save lots of work.

> How on earth are you going to tell the app what you want to draw, if you can't stand even a basic tool palette?

There are a lot of ways to do this. Hiding the UI design tools palette in a context menu (right-click), for example.

I may be interpreting the post wrong, but I took some of the lack of detail as a kind of challenge for someone to figure out how to make it happen. To me, it sounded like someone saying "a cell phone should be weightless and have infinite battery life" - obviously not achievable goals, but worth working towards.

I think the simplicity he's proposing has its usefulness - it's all dependent on where on the "[paper napkin] <----> [realistic photoshop]" continuum you need to be for your mockups. Depending on your intended use, you can get by without drop shadows and rounded corners for a lot of cases.

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