MP0
Wireframing your email campaigns—how much detail do you include?
I'm working with a client who tends to have a lot of segments for their emails. I'm discovering a need for more extensive wireframing to ensure that we don't have too many last minute changes to text and elements that could affect the design and coding.
Wondering how many of you wireframe your emails, and when you do, how much detail you put in those wireframes? I generally use them as skeletons (just including elements and maybe rough placement), but with tools like Axure, you can put quite a bit of detail. What do you use, and how do you use it?
I am currently working on a plan to eliminate most of the traditional static artifacts in the agency design to development waterfall workflow. The wires in this case will be like a component or pattern library in actual code and likely reside in Litmus Builder. This repository of components can then quickly be culled to create a full working prototype. The hope is to visually articulate how the modular components are expressed across viewports, and how they work together as a design system – much like Atomic Design. This will then eliminate traditional wires and more importantly, Photoshop comps.
In the mean time, I use Omnigraffle to create very lo-fi wires to express boxes that apply to a segment.
Thanks, that sounds like quite a project! We're not quite at that level of workflow, but we did graduate from Omnigraffle a while back due to responsive design needs. Using Axure allowed us to create versions with breakpoints that we could show in a browser. It would be great to eliminate the PSD stage, but I think I'm a long way from that right now. Thanks for the ideas!