Wireframes; A Helpful Tip

Yes, this is indeed another blog post on wireframes and their erratic behaviour. For reference, wireframes are that friend that hypes up the party enough so you and your friends drag yourselves out of bed, and hope it lives up to the hype. But does it? Well, stay tuned.

This isn’t a deep dive into wireframes, but rather a helpful tip that can save you hours, and in my case days of inspecting and rewriting wireframes. Let’s get into it.*

So, there I was, my wireframe was complete albeit a little basic. But it was complete. All the elements were accounted for, the flow and purpose was clear. I felt good about myself and essentially ready to be hired. But then I clicked on the prototype tab, and what started out as a fun little game of connect the dots ended 3 days later with me laying on my bed deciding whether on not to quit UX.

The spiraling was justifiable although admittedly dramatic, those 30 minutes proved crucial for my break through. And this is where the first tip comes in, if at first and fourth you don’t succeed, get up and take a break. You can’t do the same thing over and over and expect the problem to magically fix itself. A break gives you distance and with that a fresh perspective.

The problem I was trying to fix was my navigation button, as none of my back arrows were responding. I made sure I was on the prototype tab, and that all the elements were connected to a specific frame, but each time I went to test out my design, the arrow wasn’t working. Every other button worked, I could click on ‘next’ and I would be sent to the next frame, or click on the ‘home’ icon and I was sent to the home frame, but this, this just did not work.

So I went on Youtube, and I watched Figma tutorials, followed by all your favourite UX YouTubers. Hours and hours of wireframe and prototype tutorials but not a single one addressed why a back button might now work. 3 days later and a rant to my mentor left me pondering what I was doing with my life if I couldn’t even work a back button.

Reality slowly settled in and I decided that I would start over which honestly hurt to think about. Sitting at my desk I looked over my arrows and suddenly thought of replacing the arrows from Figma with arrow icons from the community page. The arrows of choice were from the ever reliable, Iconify. Once replaced, I went through the prototyping stages again, and clicked the play icon and began clicking away, and well, it worked.

And I screamed.

I kept testing and re-testing to make sure that I was not hallucinating, and that it indeed worked. Over and over again, it worked!

And with that I made sure my work was saved and closed my laptop. Because that was enough UX for a day.

I am not sure if anyone else has had this issue, but I'm here to save you some time and chaotic spiraling. Sometimes, you’re not the problem, sometimes just go with the icons.

*This issue is specific to Figma and not any other UX software programme.