Exploring Wireframes: Is Simple Better?

When people envision the construction of a house, they probably imagine the sounds of drills and the installation of a roof — not the extensive drawings and calculations made long before the first brick was laid.

Just because that planning doesn’t get as much attention doesn’t mean it’s not important. Building a house without careful planning is possible, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The same applies to the world of software design. Low fidelity wireframes and high fidelity wireframes are the unsung heroes of excellent software.

Why Do You Need Wireframes?

Whether you want to have a reliable house, a powerful application, or a highly-functional website, the same rule applies to each case.

Take your time for thorough planning.

It’s not a waste of time, but the opposite. Wireframes save designers, developers, and their business partners time and effort. Not using low fidelity wireframes and high fidelity wireframes means adding that extra time and money onto a project for redesign. A costly situation.

A wireframe is a simplified visual representation of a layout for a website or the screen of an application’s interface. Wireframes are like architectural blueprints. Usually black and white illustrations, sometimes with bright marks or spots to outline specific areas or points to give a clear vision of the project structure and connections between the different parts.

The advantage of accepting the importance of wireframes is that they give clients and the designers and developers on their team the opportunity to quickly plan and validate the value of of the design of a page or screen — long before any great efforts have been made to design and build that same peage.

When and Why You Need Wireframing

Wireframing is most effective at the beginning of every design process, when the main objective is creating the product’s structure.

Designers use wireframes to outline visual and typographic hierarchy on user interfaces, plan transitions and interactions, and organize the general interface in order to deliver the most valuable information to their team — and ultimately the end users.

Since a wireframe is focused on the structure, as opposed to the visualization of details and styles, designers try to keep it simple. Wireframes are mostly limited to monochromatic color schemes, where only boxes and lines represent copy, pictures, and overall the page’s elements.

How Low Fidelity Wireframes Actually Improve Creativity

A wireframe is the first visual representation of a designer’s idea. It ensures that the developers and clients get a clear understanding of the functionalities and designs that the software needs to support.

Don’t be fooled.

Despite their minimalism, designers can find wireframes, especially low-fidelity wireframes, inspiring. They are flexible tools that provide room for experimentation. This makes the creative process more productive, giving room for field of fresh, outstanding solutions.

How Clients Benefit from Simple Wireframes

Low fidelity wireframes enable teams to be Agile, meaning they help project stakeholders determine the best solution for end users faster. A a low fidelity wireframe — not a complex, fully-baked design — is enough to help the client determine whether to add or subtract features in an interface.

With their simplicity, low fidelity wireframes a quick and easy to reshape so that usability is ensured before further design and development efforts take place.

Developers Know Low Fidelity Wireframes Mean Less Churn

The other benefit a team gets from the wireframes is that developers can see the placement of the elements on the page.

When entire teams can visualize and agree upon the inclusion of features earlier in the development lifecycle, they spare their clients additional costs later on in development.

Types of Wireframes

Consisting of boxes and lines, a wireframe can be as basic as a sketch on paper or a whiteboard.

Most designers create wireframes different fidelity levels within a short time that illustrate simple, visual elements.

Typically wireframes fall into one of three groups:

1. Low Fidelity Wireframes

Lоw fidelity wireframes are usually black and white schemes or simple sketches on paper, focused on the “big picture” of the page/project. UI elements are shown as boxes and lines without detailed annotations.

While lоw fidelity wireframes are usually abstract, they offer a chance to see the basic structure of the user interface. They may not take a lot of effort, but they spare a lot of extra effort down the road.

They help businesses shape their product in the early stages of collaboration with the development team.

2. Medium Fidelity Wireframes

Medium fidelity wireframes are created in a monochrome or grayscale palette. While medium fidelity wireframes can still be created manually, using digital tools to create more detailed and realistic UI components can also be meaningful for understanding how some aesthetic details could merge with essential functionalities.

3. High Fidelity Wireframes

High fidelity wireframes are created solely with digital tools.

The core difference from the other types of wireframes is that high fidelity wireframes are built in with color and present screens that are closer to how they would appear in final version of the software.

High Fidelity Wireframing vs Prototyping

Since both are created in full color and could be mistaken for a completed project, high fidelity wireframes are often confused with prototypes.

But with different aims and focuses, they are actually used at different stages of the design process.

While low, medium, and high fidelity wireframes are focused mostly on conveying the structure of the page, prototypes are created to give the more detailed look of the interaction behind the UI elements, their style, and positioning. Prototypes are very helpful later on during the user-testing stage, but their initial purpose usually is for the client to see if the solutions and decisions made about the product are efficient.

Know When to Use Wireframes vs Prototypes

Prototypes enable designers, clients, and test users to validate the usability and overall value of solution design — but in terms of design, they are still different from the final product itself, and this distinction is key.

Teams do best to use prototypes at different stages of the UI process according to the requirements and goals of the project at hand. Prototypes transform static wireframes into clickable and interactive assets so the designer can test the interface. This is a key step in the design process because it allows identifying possible problems and difficulties with user interactions.

Making alterations, adding elements, and changing transitions is much more time-consuming and costly for the client if done during the implementation of the design. Prototyping avoids this, validating interactions within software before the development team starts with their work.

Prototyping is an efficient and useful way for designers to validate their work and test their assumptions before shifting from UX design to UI implementation.

There are, of course, exceptions — prototyping for the sake of validating aspects like usability and aesthetics in the final phase of UI design is not as reasonable as as some might think. It is important that usability is thoroughly checked during the UX design stage. Otherwise, it would be much harder to improve an inefficient user experience after much of the UI elements have been completed.

6 Tips to Make Wireframing More Efficient

There are no big secrets about creating quality low fidelity wireframes, medium fidelity wireframes, and high fidelity wireframes. Still, there are some tips that designers and their clients can use to drive value throughout the software development process.

1. Do Thorough Research Beforehand

Do not start the wireframing process before outlining project goals, identifying the target audience, and understanding the problems that the product is designed to solve. In such cases, heuristic evaluations are highly suggested, before stepping into the process of wireframing.

2. Keep Them Simple

The aim of a wireframe is to create a structure of the page design. Save the details for later. Keep them simple now.

3. Use a Monochromatic Palette

The design process is more productive if the designer completes low fidelity wireframes sooner, and leaves details such as colors, shadows and fonts for the next step.

4. Write Annotations

If a designer plans to present a wireframe to the team, depending on the project and client needs, it’s a good idea to include annotations. These can prompt conversation and provide a guideline for those revisiting wireframes later on.

5. Gather Feedback

Ask team members’ opinions and even those of potential users. It is an effective way to improve the work and saves time for later stages that will require more intensive design work.

6. Always Use a Grid

For designers, a grid is a series of vertical and horizontal lines that divide a page into spaces used for margins, columns, inter-column spaces, lines of type, spaces between blocks of type, and images. A grid provides designers a foundation for an entire software layout. They are especially helpful for multipage documents, making the design process quicker, and ensuring visual consistency between related pages.

Development teams also benefit from grids, using them to space assets evenly as they take away the guesswork out of defining and and maintaining proper spacing, margins, paddings etc.

Wireframes Take Low Effort & Offer High Return

Wireframes, especially low fidelity wireframes, are effective tools that save time and expenses both for software teams and their business partner. Offering simple ways to validate ideas early on before extensive design or development processes have begun, they decrease the chances of major pivots later on during technical engagements.

Image Source: Unsplash, Cris DiNoto

Original post can be found here.

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Authored by Tsvetelina Lazarova.

Tsvetelina, doesn’t just design for her job. It’s her life. Passionate about design and illustration from an early age, Tsvetelina is now thrilled to share her knowledge with colleagues and clients alike. While she brings a lot of experience to the table, Tsvetelina knows there is a way to make the user experience even better. In the past, Tsvetelina worked both as a Front-end developer and as a Game Designer. She once volunteered her design skills at a Danish startup, too. When she isn’t working, Tsvetelina can be found either finishing her design degree or sketching her next big idea.