In the design world, many industry terms get thrown around. One of these popular terms is wireframing: what does it mean, and what is its purpose?
As a design team, wireframing is crucial to our process. Glossing over this term can leave clients confused and unable to grasp how wireframing creates better designs by minimizing revisions and maximizing cost-effectiveness.
This blog will explore what wireframing is, discuss its essential role in digital design, and provide expert answers to wireframing FAQs.
What is a Wireframe?
A wireframe is the skeleton of a digital design. Wireframes show where the most important elements of a design will go, helping visualize its structure.
Essentially, wireframing is a visual way to outline a project. Just like how authors outline a story before writing, designers create a wireframe to assess how every feature should fit into the design.
Instead of just describing a design, a wireframe explains ideas in a way words cannot: visually.
Wireframes also help designers and clients maintain focus on the larger, most crucial design elements before moving on to smaller details. This maintains a manageable project scope, preventing designers and clients from getting carried away.
Like a blueprint, a good wireframe becomes a guide to reference throughout the project.
Wireframing is commonly used in digital designs, such as creating a website or app. However, designers may also use the term to describe non-digital projects, such as magazine layouts.
Why Wireframing is Essential to Design
Provide Structure
Knowing where to start a project is often the hardest part. Creating a wireframe provides structure to the design process, helping take big-picture ideas and translate them into specific design elements. It increases clarity, mapping out layouts before taking the design further.
Ensure Alignment
Wireframing provides an opportunity to touch base with the client to ensure the project structure aligns with their expectations. As a visual representation of the project, a wireframe is a helpful communication tool in ensuring that nothing is missed. Especially for clients who are visual learners, a wireframe is an invaluable tool!
Maximize Efficiency
Client and design team alignment increases clarity, enabling designers to feel more confident and ready to do their best work.
When designers know that the basics of a design are approved, they can focus on smaller details without having to make major structural changes later, thereby maximizing efficiency and client satisfaction.
Maintain a User Focus
Every digital design has an end user, whether it’s a website, app, or other product. Wireframing ensures that the user stays at the front of the designer’s mind throughout the process. Wireframing helps designers envision how people will interact with the product, ultimately creating a better user experience.
How Wireframing Contributes to User Experience (UX)
In the digital world, how a user interacts with a product, like a website, is known as user experience. Wireframing is an important step in ensuring that a digital product is easy and enjoyable to use.
Here are some other ways that wireframing creates better user experiences:
Clarifies User Flow
By creating a skeleton version of a design, UX designers can test how the average user will interact with the product. This helps identify issues and resolve structural problems before moving on to more complex details. It determines ahead of time how users will naturally navigate around a website or app, reducing friction.
Content Hierarchy
By outlining every part of a design, it’s easier to understand what the most important information is and where it should be placed to get the user’s attention. Wireframing helps to group sections of a design, ensuring they flow together to provide the desired result.
Navigation
A home button on a mobile app or a navigation menu on a website homepage are staples in digital design, meaning users will instinctively look for them. Considering where these crucial navigation components should be placed ensures no one will get lost while navigating around a website.
Balancing Aesthetics and Function
Designers sometimes want to skip to the “fun” part of choosing colours, fonts and images. Wireframing helps balance the look and function of a product by making sure functional elements aren’t ignored.
Flexibility
The wireframing stage is the ideal phase to make structural changes to a design, before significant time has been invested in smaller elements. This saves both design and development time, helping minimize costs to the client.
Designer Answers Common Questions About Wireframing
Think of this section as the People Also Ask section on Google. We’re here to provide quick, easy answers to these top wireframing questions!
How Does Wireframing Work?
Wireframing is the process of planning out a digital design. Common projects that use wireframes are website or app design. Designers use software like Figma or Adobe XD to create layouts, which will eventually become a completed design.
When Does Wireframing Happen?
Wireframing happens at the beginning of a design process. After meeting with the client, the design team will work to create a visual outline for the project. The wireframe may then be presented to the client to articulate the project plan, ensuring everyone is on the same page. From there, the design team takes the wireframe and brings its structure to life.
What is Wireframing Also Called?
A wireframe may also be referred to as a skeleton, blueprint, page schematic, or mockup.
How Long Does Wireframing Take?
Wireframing is designed to reduce design time by maximizing efficiency.
Like writing a good story outline, a wireframe ensures that every crucial piece is included from the beginning, preventing having to rework the entire piece later to add something.
In the end, wireframing may constitute 20 to 30% of the overall time spent on a design project.
What is Wireframing in UX/UI?
In user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design, wireframing is the plan that dictates optimal page layouts for the best user experience.
What are the 3 Types of Wireframes?
Designers may split the wireframing process into three stages, known as low, mid, and high-fidelity wireframes. These wireframes vary in complexity, from a broad overview to a product mockup at the most detailed stage.
What are the Benefits of Wireframing?
Providing structure, ensuring client and team alignment, efficiency, and maintaining user focus are great reasons to include wireframing in your design process.
Our Wireframing Tips for Experienced and Junior Designers
As a design team, we’re always looking for ways to refine our wireframing strategy. To help other experienced and junior designers, we’ve summarized our learnings into these tips:
Avoid Rushing Ahead
Don’t bypass this important first step of wireframing. It might feel slow, but it will save you a ton of time later.
Keep It Simple
The point isn’t to make your wireframes look good, but to make them clear. Like all facets of design, less is usually more. A clean, simple wireframe usually means a solid foundation.
When wireframing, we recommend sticking to boxes and text. This will help clients see structure without getting hung up on colours or fonts.
Be Flexible
Fail fast to get to the best result quickly. Work fast and loose. Move stuff around. Test ideas fast. It’s easier to fix things now than in the full design.
Focus on Flow
Always ask yourself: what’s the user doing next? Wireframes are about the journey, not just the screen. The idea is to lay the groundwork for an engaging user experience that is easy to navigate.
Remember the Project’s “Why”
The goal of wireframing is to create purpose-driven design. Wireframing helps you think about a web project more holistically, allowing you to plan for engaging visuals and animations that flow seamlessly throughout the site, creating a more synchronized and intuitive user experience.
Summary
Wireframing is the often hidden work that goes into a digital design project. But its impact doesn’t go unnoticed: effective wireframes create successful products and positive user experiences.
This blog has covered the basics you should know about wireframing, from a designer’s perspective. We’ve shared why it matters and answered common questions you may have.
As a design and marketing agency, we’ve seen the benefits of including wireframing in our design process. It helps establish clear navigation and structure, resulting in websites and apps with better flow and a stronger user experience. For clients, this leads to a more seamless and positive interaction for their business overall.
With wireframing, our agency projects experience better timelines, collaboration is easier when we’re all on the same page, and clients are happier with the results.
Curious how we implement wireframing into our projects? We’d be happy to discuss how it takes our project collaborations to the next level.
Contact us with your questions or project requests — we can’t wait to hear from you!