Dive into our wireframing in UI/UX Design. Flow2Web presenting deeper insights into the topic of UX wireframing. Wireframing in UI/UX Design is one of the most crucial steps which involves visualizing the skeleton of digital applications.
What Is a Wireframe?
A wireframe is a visual representation of a user interface, stripped of any visual design or branding elements. It is used by UX Designers to define the heirachy of items on a screen and communicate what the items on that page should be based on user needs. In the world of software and web design, the wireframe definition is similar. A wireframe is a diagram or a set of diagrams that consists of simple lines and shapes representing the skeleton of a website or an application’s user interface (UI) and core functionality.
Why do you need wireframing?
Wireframing is a fast and cheap way to plan the structure of the page or screen design. It gives numerous advantageous opportunities not only for designers but for the whole development team and for clients too. First of all, a wireframe is the first visual representation of a designer’s abstract idea. This step ensures that the developers and the clients get a clear understanding of the project’s design. Furthermore, in case the client wants to make some changes, a wireframe is much easier to reshape since it doesn’t take much efforts and time to create one.
The other benefit a team gets from the wireframes is that developers can clearly see the placement of the elements on the page. Some software for creating wireframes allows seeing all the sizes and spacing by clicking a single button that saves time for both the designer and the development team. In addition, wireframing is quite inspiring for designers. It is flexible and provides much room for experiments which make the creative process more productive and presents the field for fresh outstanding solutions.
What are the different types of wireframes?
There is an opinion that a wireframe is exceptionally a low-fidelity paper sketch of the page structure with boxes and lines illustrating visual elements. Nevertheless, today modern technologies help designers create wireframes of a different fidelity level within a short time and without great effort. Typically we can define 3 widely-used types of wireframes.
- Low-fidelity wireframes
- Medium-fidelity wireframes
- High-fidelity wireframes (mockups)
Types of Wireframing tools
Wireframes can be simply hand-drawn but are often put together using software like Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, Zeplin, Balsamiq to provide an on-screen layout. Using such tools you can create wireframes that are interactive in nature as well where you can showcase the interactions between screens and also quick usability testing or heuristic evaluation.
What should a wireframe look like?
Most wireframes are essentially black and white diagrams with various UI elements and notes upon them. In most cases they should be devoid of imagery, branding and colour.
Some clients may have trouble making the leap of imagination from sketch representation to final page so use your best judgement to decide how ‘finalised’ the wireframe should appear.
Conclusion
Wireframes should be used early in a project to get user and client approval on the layout of key pages and the navigation. This will provide the project team, specifically the designers, confidence in moving forward. Wireframes will also save considerable time and money in the testing and amends phase later in the project.
Also for digital wireframing, there are various wireframing kits available in different tools to fast forward converting paper to digital wireframes. Figma is one of the most powerful UI/UX tool in current times for easy collaboration with your design team members. Wireframing collaboratively with Figma is a much easier task than other tools while remote collaboration.
