Intro to Wireframing
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.
A
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.
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.
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
Low-fidelity
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
Pro Tip! Sketch fast and don't get attached to your wireframes — they're meant for testing and are part of an iterative process.
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
Visualizing the features on a
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
Based on information gathered during research about users' mental models and behavioral patterns, information architects can craft
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
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
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.
Another upside of using
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
The iterative
Wireframes let you test and improve 4 things — the structure,
References
- Why Startups Fail: Top 12 Reasons l CB Insights | CB Insights Research
- What Is A Wireframe? Everything You Need To Know (And More) | CareerFoundry