Parallax. It may be an unfamiliar term to many. It’s defined as the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer. For example, a driver may look at a speedometer and it reads 65, but when the passenger looks on it appears to read a different speed due to the difference in angle they are viewing the speedometer from. There’s nothing different with the speedometer itself, but just the angle it is viewed from makes it appear different.

We need to view our designs from the parallax as well. Well, to clarify, we need to view them both head on and from the parallax as well. Doing this doesn’t change the content but gives us a different viewing angle of that content from which we base our designs. This can mean many different things. We can adapt this to mean designing a web app to fit a mobile experience or we can adapt it to mean moving a local machine experience to a network-based experience. Or maybe it’s just a simple (or not so simple) redesign. It’s really just about taking the same basic problem and adapting that problem for some difference in an environmental variable, but the purpose is to use these different angles to feed various POVs into our designs to improve the user experience.

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Let’s spend some time talking about the design process. Of course, we’re not going to hit every step here but we’ll hit the basic steps of getting to the wireframing step. Ideally, this would all be proceeded by steps such as some preliminary user research, persona creation, requirements gathering and other necessary steps in the UX process, but this article will focus on the meat of creating wireframes and mockups. We’ll talk about how to set up flows, how to translate those into functions, and then ultimately transform those into a usable form.
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