Do you want to develop a digital product? Is your business demanding a website? Or are you revamping an existing one? Consider reading this article and thank us later. I have written this article based on the organised strategies used by our professional designers at HODO.

“Wireframing and prototyping techniques enhance the quality of the user experience” — this sentence can be found in many articles over the internet. But how?

Let us start with the basics and address the common queries.

What Is Meant By Wireframing?

Wireframing is the first step in designing a digital product — be it a website, a web app or a mobile app. It helps you visualise and ensure that the designer has understood your requirements. We like to describe a wireframe as a two-dimensional skeletal form that demonstrates all the elements on the key pages of a digital product. The wireframe does not include colours, images or the final design of the digital product.

Why Are Wireframes Important? Why Should You Use Wireframes?

Wireframes not only depict the elements on a particular page, but also play an important role in enhancing the user interface, and hence the user experience. It involves important aspects like the digital product’s functionalities, user interactions, and information mapping.

Wireframes can also be defined as the foundation of your digital product. The stronger the foundation, the stronger your final product will be.

The most important benefit of wireframing is that you get an opportunity to visualise and verify the basic structure of your product much earlier in the development process. If you identify any glaring issues at this stage, it is much easier for the designer to rectify them.

The whole point of wireframing is to make fewer revisions after a design is finalised. The more planning you do in the wireframing stage, the lesser changes are required later.

If the wireframing is not done properly, you can still go ahead and design your product. But reworking a fully developed product is a more time consuming, painstaking and costly affair. Instead, invest your time in correcting the wireframes, sending feedback to the designer and making the changes to them to save time and money.

What Are The Two Steps of Wireframing?

WIreframing can be as simple as drawing on your sketchpad, or as complex as a full-blown prototype. An ideal wireframing process comprises the following two steps

STEP 1: Low-fidelity wireframes

Low-fidelity wireframes are commonly known as ‘Lo-Fi’ among designers. They are rough sketches of how a website or application should look like. They are created with minimal colours and simple designs. These can be in the form of a pencil sketch on paper or using wireframing tools.

STEP 2: High-fidelity wireframes

Once you approve a low fidelity wireframe, high fidelity wireframes can be created with the selected colour palette. High-fidelity wireframes are popularly known as ‘Hi-Fi’. They tend to be highly detailed and interactive.

Wondering Why Lo-fi Wireframes Are Colourless?

Yes, we know, Lo-Fi wireframes can look boring — maybe even disappointing because they are nowhere near the product you had in mind. But they lack colour and images for a reason — too many colours or images can distract and deviate you from giving attention to the intended goal of the wireframes. You should be focusing on the page’s layout, functionalities, and inter-page navigation.

You can use dummy texts like Lorem ipsum for better visualisation. Also, to make things easier for you, there are tools like data populator to generate realistic and meaningful dummy text!

What Are The Best Tools To Design Wireframes?

There are plenty of digital tools over the internet to help you create wireframes. Some of the commonly used ones being Adobe XD, Sketch, Pronto.io, Balsamiq or you can simply portray it using your sketching pad and pen by hand.

How Does Wireframing Enhance The User Experience?

Wireframes not only bring clarity to your project but also can be used to enhance the user experience.

Remember, creating wireframes do not require any coding. At the wireframing stage, you have not developed a full-fledged product, but it looks as good as one! You can test your high fidelity wireframes on your target audience, collect their feedback, analyse, criticise and revise the design, even before development begins!

This gives you the power to enhance the user experience by diminishing faults way before the product launch.

Seek Professional Advice

Wireframing is the foundation that leads to better functioning and delightful products. Try out the free tools available online for yourselves or seek professional support.

At HODO, we have a team of professional designers driven by an absolute passion for product design and development. Book a free consultation today to plan your next project!

We reiterate — the stronger your foundation, the stronger your final product will be.