What happens during website discovery, wireframing, and design review?
What you get out of discovery, what a wireframe is, and how to give useful design feedback.
Discovery produces the page list, the conversion goal for each page, and the content plan. Wireframes decide structure and hierarchy. Design review is where you check the design against those goals, not against your taste. Every project that goes sideways skipped one of the three.
What discovery produces
Discovery is not a questionnaire. Done properly it ends with four concrete artifacts: a sitemap listing every page, a stated primary action for each page, an inventory of what content exists and what has to be created, and a list of the integrations the site has to talk to. It also surfaces the things nobody mentioned in the sales call, like the three legacy landing pages still running in a Google Ads campaign.
The most useful hour in discovery is usually with the people who answer the phone. They know the questions buyers actually ask, and those questions are the page outline.
What a wireframe is and is not
A wireframe is a gray box drawing of what goes where and in what order. No colors, no photography, no final copy. Its only job is to settle hierarchy: what a visitor sees first, what proof sits near the ask, where the form goes.
Clients often find wireframes underwhelming, which is the point. If the structure is wrong, no amount of visual polish will fix it, and finding that out in gray boxes costs a day instead of a week.
How to give feedback a designer can use
- Review against the goal for that page. The question is whether this design gets a visitor to the action, not whether you like the blue.
- Describe the problem, not the solution. Make the logo bigger is a solution. I cannot tell whose site this is on my phone is a problem, and it has better fixes.
- Consolidate. One list from one owner. Five stakeholders emailing separately produces contradictions someone has to resolve, usually by asking you.
- Separate must-fix from preference, and say which is which.
- Look at it on a phone before you comment. Most of your visitors will.
The design review is also the right time to raise anything legal or regulatory. Disclaimers, required language, and claim restrictions are much cheaper to build in than to retrofit.
Related: What does a website redesign process look like?, Do you handle website copywriting?, Who writes the copy and where do the photos come from?, and our blog post on web design vs product design.