Intro to Wireframing

Explore the basics of wireframing, including its purpose and benefits
Intro to Wireframing Lesson

Many teams underestimate wireframing and consider it an unnecessary step of the design process. At the same time, 17% of startups blamed an unfriendly user interface for their failure.[1]

What are the benefits of introducing wireframes to your project timeline?

  • Wireframes allow you to plan and structure a page's basic layout before visual design and content are in the picture.
  • Wireframes are simple and don't require more than a pen and paper to test ideas with users and stakeholders.
  • Wireframes are cost-effective. Once you get the first feedback, you can easily toss away the first drafts and improve ideas for subsequent testing iterations.
  • Wireframes encourage collaboration and bring all team members on board with product development.
What is a wireframe?

A wireframe, also known as a wire, is a simplified black and white version of designs that work as a bridge between developers, designers, project managers, and clients. They ensure everyone is on the same page while discussing the overall structure and functionality of the future product.

Wireframes define dimensions and placement of page elements, information architecture, intended behaviors, and navigation for your website. Usually, they're stripped of any decorative elements like logos, visuals, fonts, and colors that could distract team members at this point of the product discussion.[2]

Pro Tip! Focus on the content and keep wireframes monochromatic — aesthetics should come later. 

Wireframes tell a story

Browsing a well-crafted, intuitive, and compelling interface is like reading a great story. Wireframing is a crucial step of product development that allows team members to figure out what their website or app will tell users through multiple drafts and sketches.

To do this, the team should balance out user needs and business requirements while integrating user journeys that they want and should take.

Arrange a brainstorming session with your colleagues and generate ideas and insights by focusing on questions like:

  • How would you explain to a friend what the product helps with?
  • How can it make life easier for people?
  • What can users do on your website?
  • What goals can they accomplish?

Pro Tip! Before jumping into wireframing, you can start by jotting down the team's ideas in a text editor and write an actual story.  

Wireframes explore concepts

Wireframing is a part of the exploratory phase. It's the time when the team collaborates on ideas and concepts, explores competitors, evaluates business requirements, and decides on how to implement each feature.

Due to technical or business limitations, you may develop a couple of variants for crafting a search functionality or profile page. Wireframing provides a low-cost and speedy method to sketch all ideas, test them on team members, clients, or users, and decide the winner.

Low-fidelity wireframes are perfect for exploring concepts. You can create rough drafts with simplistic images and block shapes with only a pen and paper.

Wireframes allow for rapid testing

So, you have some unique ideas about a future product design, the team is on board, and the client is excited. How can you verify that those ideas will satisfy your users' needs and help them complete their tasks efficiently? Wireframing is the cheapest tool that designers can use for rapid testing, evaluating their assumptions, and adjusting concepts until they meet users' expectations.

You don't need to dwell on images, colors, or interactive elements to get user feedback right away. Wireframes are usually a single-use tool that should be easy to craft and update. You can attach wireframes to surveys, use them while interviewing users, or share them with clients — do whatever you think will help you get feedback, then make adjustments, and test again.

Pro Tip! Sketch fast and don't get attached to your wireframes — they're meant for testing and are part of an iterative process.

Wireframes clarify and define features

One of the greatest advantages of wireframes is their visual representation. They make it much easier to demonstrate things like user paths, clarify and define features, and stay on the same page when using terms like "hamburger menu," "hero image," or "call to action."

Visualizing the features on a wireframe allows you to demonstrate how things will eventually work and may prompt you to remove unnecessary elements, develop new ideas, and restructure certain areas. Wireframing helps save time and effort, allowing you to spot technical inconsistencies and potential difficulties during the exploratory stage. Plus, establishing a rapport with clients and speaking the same language will contribute to more efficient product development.

Wireframes display site architecture

In the physical world, architects are responsible for planning building structures and arranging rooms so people can navigate and use them for living or working. Digital products also require a well-thought organization of content throughout a page, referred to as information architecture.[3]

Based on information gathered during research about users' mental models and behavioral patterns, information architects can craft wireframes to demonstrate the hierarchy of content and navigation. They focus on categorizing, distributing, and placing content so that users can navigate between screens intuitively.

Wireframes keep the concept user-focused

Wireframes are excellent communication devices — they facilitate user feedback, instigate conversations with the stakeholders, and generate ideas between designers. Conducting user testing during the early wireframing stage allows designers to get honest feedback and identify key pain points, which in turn can help develop the product concept.[4]

To collect qualitative data, you should ask open-ended questions. For example, instead of showing a page with wireframe text and asking if users find it helpful, you can use placeholder text and ask what kind of content users expect to be there. This kind of insight helps designers understand what feels intuitive to users and create comfortable and easy-to-use products.

Wireframes help save time

Wireframing usually comes after the site map is created and before the creative design phase. Sometimes it might be tempting to skip the wireframing stage and move on to the design right away. But will it save time?

Think of wireframing as building the blueprints of a house. Can you speed up the construction of a house by disregarding the blueprints? Of course not.

A well-designed wireframe will save you both time and money — the better the team understands the product they're about to build, the fewer problems you are going to encounter. And issues are much easier to fix at earlier stages than they are after the product is created.

Wireframes keep usability at the forefront

Usability measures how well users in a specific context can use a product to achieve a defined goal efficiently and satisfactorily. Creating wireframes allows you to answer the 2 most common questions software builders come across:

  • What are some ways to solve the problems faced by our customers? To answer this question, you need to generate as many ideas as possible. The more ideas you have, the easier it will be to see the faults and highlights of each.
  • How do I know if this solution actually solves their problems? To answer this question, you show your wireframes to others to validate and improve your ideas. That's when everyone looks objectively at a website's ease of use, conversion paths, naming of links, visual hierarchy, navigation, and feature placement.

Wireframes can point out flaws in your site architecture or how a specific feature may work. Finding these issues early on is always better.

Wireframes address scalability and ease-of-updates

Another upside of using wireframes is that they allow you to immediately identify how well your site will handle content growth. Scalability and flexibility are especially crucial for clients who need content-managed websites, where they can publish, edit, and modify content without changing the code.

If your website offers a couple of products now, but you plan to expand in the future, you need the website to accommodate the growth of your line of products without impacting the design, site architecture, or usability. Wireframes will identify these critical areas of content growth.

Wireframes make the design process iterative

The iterative design process is an approach that designers and developers use to continually improve a product's design. It includes creating prototypes, testing them, analyzing team and user feedback, and refining the product as a result. While any part of the design process can be iterative, it's worth starting as early as possible — full design mock-ups take more time to be reworked than simplified wireframes.

Wireframes let you test and improve 4 things — the structure, layout, content, and functionality of your website or app, without touching the creative and branding aspects of the product. 

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