Wireframing is a speedy and adequate way to determine usability issues early on in your design approach. If you are a web designer, you must be aware of wireframing, and if you are a user experience (UX) designer, you assumably spend a lot of your time creating wireframes either by scratching it on paper or by using digital tools. This article is for those who have heard the term and would like to explore why wireframes play a significant role in the success of any design process.
Let’s start with, What is a wireframe?
- Wireframes are uncomplicated black and white designs that outline the specific size and placement of page components, site components, conversion spots, and navigation for your website.
- They are devoid of color, font options, logos, or any real design components that take away from purely focusing on a site’s layout.
- They are much like a blueprint of the structure of the house. You need to focus on the foundational structure of the building rather than the interior design, like the colors of the walls or the furniture.
What should be included in a wireframe?
It’s recommended to design wireframes as an initial step in the designing process to save time in the long run. They will help you address problems early as they arise and not wait for the full-color phase.
Wireframes must include the following elements:
- The logo placeholder
- Breadcrumb navigation
- The location of the search field
- Headers ( H1, H2,…)
- Content placeholders
- Share buttons
- Footer content
Keeping your wireframes uncomplicated is the number one rule. It is done solely to demonstrate how components are applied on the page and how the site navigation should operate. Using a lot of colors or images can distract the reader from focusing on the layout and navigational elements. You have to reduce the use of color, images, graphics, or stylized fonts to achieve your goal of displaying a simple visual presentation of the wireframes.
Here are F360 important tips for wireframing
- Keep your wireframes coloured in grays, whites, and blacks.
- Use a generic font to avoid distraction by typography. However, showing the hierarchy of data through font is still essential, though, and can be shown by simply changing the size and playing with “regular,” “italic,” or “bold.”
- Avoid highly stylized graphics and images. Instead of that, you can use shapes like squares and rectangles as placeholders, adding an “x” in the middle of the box to demonstrate where to add the image or the video will be placed. In the case of the video, you may use a triangle as the play button in the middle.
What is the key purpose of Wireframes?
- Wireframes are an amazing tool to guide clients about the structure of a design without being distracted by colors or images.
- It gives them a visual of the end page look and feels since they are most probably unaware of technical terms like hero image.
- Wireframes can be used to map page functionality, identify concerns early, and save time for later revisions.
- It takes less time and effort to apply changes to the wireframe than a high fidelity mockup with many design elements.
- It facilitates explaining page features through wireframing to clients.
- They are affordable and easy to make with tons of tools available online like Creately and Luchidchart.
- Wireframe also allows you to understand your client’s ideas better. The feedback you receive from your clients and their interactions with it gives you a better understanding of what you can expect in future phases of the project. As you run the wireframing process, you may find that clients continue to comment on certain elements. This helps you track feedback patterns and find out what your customers want to see and what they don’t like.
- Wireframes save time on the entire project as it takes a lot more time, effort, and expertise to create a full-color layout in Photoshop than a wireframe. It helps in:
- Keeping your designs structured.
- Saving the development team time as they are pretty clear on what they are building.
- Facilitating the task of content creators and saving their time too.
- Wireframes enable revealing space constraints and designing the hierarchy of elements on the page. It offers an early way to imagine the hierarchy of the pages and visually display the space constraints before you start designing your page and filling it with content.
In conclusion, the mapping feature reduces the pre-and post-work that often accompanies the development phase early. It’s easier to rewrite the function in a wireframe than on a web application.
Creating a website is a process. Wireframing is part of a weaving process that shouldn’t be skipped, just as you wouldn’t build a house without blueprints or live without decoration. Each step occupies an important position in the larger process.
If you reach this point, you are probably looking to create your website and looking for wireframing. Our UX/UI developers can help turn your ideas into beautiful wireframes that speak your mind.
Explore our web development services.