C H A P T E R  5

Wireframing for SharePoint

You can’t do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

John Singer Sargent

When working with a team of people to design a SharePoint site, there is often a desire to get a graphic artist to make a full-fidelity composition of what it will look like when it’s finished. By full fidelity I mean a perfect simulation of a finished page (or pages), usually made in Adobe Photoshop. This is always a difficult thing to do properly because the details of what the site is meant to do and how it is meant to work have not yet been defined. When we ask the designer to do this, he or she will have to make assumptions and take wild guesses about how the site will work.

Creating these types of comps too soon leads people to start focusing on things like fonts and colors and pictures at much too early a stage in the project. Stakeholders can tend to take the designer’s best guess about how the site could work and make those into features of how the site will work, which is sometimes not in the best interests of the functionality of the final site.