Just as architects don't build houses without blueprints, smart designers don't build digital products without wireframes – here's why they're your secret weapon for better UX.
Suppose you wanted to design a new house. Before you could add furniture, paint the walls, or hang paintings, you would need to create blueprints for the actual structure of the house. Without that structure, you wouldn't know where to put anything.
Designing digital products is a little like building a house. Before you can put in all the custom features and visuals you want, you need to have a blueprint for the overall structure of the product. This structure is made up of wireframes, which are a kind of visual guide for the digital skeleton of your website or app.
Wireframes are primarily designed in the beginning stages of building an app or website because they provide a crucial framework for design development throughout the entire lifecycle of the product. Without wireframes, building a digital product would be chaotic, disorganised, and prone to error. With wireframes, you can establish structure and obtain user feedback early.
Wireframes provide multiple benefits throughout the entire lifecycle of a project:
If you run a business, chances are you want it to grow. But what works at one scale might not work at another.
Suppose you run an e-commerce store, for example. When you start out you might have 10 products, but over time that number might grow to over 1,000. If your website isn't designed for that, it could be difficult to add all those new product pages.
Wireframes make growing your website or app easier and more predictable. You might have a specific structure for all your product pages, for example, so that when you add a new product, all you have to do is "fill in the blanks", with images and text. This keeps everything clean and consistent over time.
Artists usually make rough sketches before filling in the fine details of a painting or drawing. This is because the details can take a long time to complete, and if you don't have a sketch to begin with, the whole piece might end up skewed and unbalanced.
Wireframes help come up with a basic outline of the finished product before actually finishing it. This helps make sure that everything is carefully aligned and well thought out. It also gives the client an opportunity to review and make changes before moving on to adding details.
You don't need a finished product to collect feedback from potential users. In fact, you probably shouldn't have a finished product when you start collecting feedback. Instead, you should have pretty much the bare minimum, simplest thing you can show people.
Most early website or app prototypes are really just wireframes with a few extra features and visuals filled in. In many cases, the core functionality doesn't really work- they are just a test version to give users a feel for what the finished product might be like.
Collecting feedback in this way is important for building an MVP, so that you can test that your product idea will actually work. It is also important for designing the ultimate user experience. By giving early testers access to your UX ideas, you can get their feedback about whether or not those ideas will actually work or not, thus promoting user centered design.
Building wireframes early means spotting issues early. Some problems are hard to see when an app is filled with colors and illustrations. The grayscale simplicity of wireframe mockups, on the other hand, can make it easier to notice when something is wrong.
For example, one common UX mistake is having text that is not aligned with the actual functionality of the interface. A button should say precisely what it will do when clicked. With wireframes, this is immediately verifiable, as the button would contain little information other than its text.
The size and placement of individual pieces of functionality determine how your app will be used. And that is precisely what wireframes can map out.
Imagine you opened your Uber app, and discovered that the Order Ride button was really tiny and hidden away in some sort of dropbox menu. That would obviously be a bad way to organize the UX. Because ordering a ride is essentially the core service of the app, you want it to be easily visible and accessible.
Prioritization becomes even more subtle when pursuing features like offering promotions and collecting feedback. You want users to notice such options, but you also don't want them to feel intrusive or annoying. By mapping out such functionality through wireframes first, you can find a balanced approach for the UX.
If we didn't have wireframes, every digital project would be a single giant monolith. You would have to build the entire app or website as a single, tightly connected piece.
Wireframes split the project into smaller pieces, so that each can be worked on separately. This is especially important for large projects with many people doing different things. Wireframes allow you to have team members work independently, so that the graphic designers can make visuals without needing the writers to finish the text first.
Wireframes are not a single technology or tool, like Microsoft Word or ChatGPT. They come in many different forms and range in complexity. Basically, any technique you use to map out your digital project in general terms before filling in can probably be called a wireframe.
Typically, wireframes are all black and white, and made up of simple shapes, like rectangles. In later stages, there might be some use of basic color or font styling.
The simplest wireframes are not even digital. Physical wireframes, drawn on a whiteboard or the back of a cocktail napkin, were how websites were first designed 30 years ago. This practice is still useful at the beginning of the design process, since it is so tactile and fast. But as the project progresses, wireframes will need to become digital, and gradually more complicated.
Low fidelity wireframes focus on user flow and page structure. These are just basic digital outlines or sketches, often all in grayscale and made out of simple block sections. These wireframes can be either digital or physical.
Medium fidelity wireframes add some detail and basic functionality. They may not exhibit the core functionality of your product, but they do offer the ability to navigate around and click on things.
High fidelity wireframes add high level information about the general look and feel of the finished product. Some fonts and button shapes will be filled in. At this stage, designers should have a pretty good idea of how to make the general structure and organization of the product, based on user feedback. High fidelity wireframes are used instead to collect feedback about the look and feel of the product.
Wireframes start simple and become more complex during the design process. They are never, however, supposed to be as complex as the finished product. They always need to be kept basic enough that they can be reused to add new content or functionality to the product.
Wireframes are limited forms of your product idea. Their limited nature is their advantage, but also their downside.
Some UX elements depend on subtle make or break factors. Think of a slider that moves too slowly, or a button that has an obnoxious color. These tiny details are exactly what will not be captured in a wireframe, and they need to be discovered separately.
Once you've settled on your final wireframe designs, and have moved on to finer details, it can be difficult to make big changes to the design. But this is also the point of designing wireframes in the first place. The goal is to map out the right structure first, so that you don't have to change it later.
And sometimes wireframes don't contain the content you will use for the finished product. Ideally, you should design wireframes based on what content you expect to have. But if the content is designed separately, and standards like size and style are not communicated effectively, it can be hard to fit in properly.
Here are some good tips for making the most out of your wireframes:
Start simple, and gradually add complexity. The process is exactly like an artist who starts with a few general shapes and gradually adds in detail.
Set clear expectations with the client. They should know that wireframes only indicate the skeleton of the project and won't include fine aesthetic details.
Design for different devices. If you plan for your application to work on desktop and mobile, it will have to render in two different ways. You will probably have to adjust the wireframes to fit both options.
Consider different user scenarios. Most apps will be used by multiple different groups of people, each of which with their own goals and behavior preferences for using the app. The final product should be able to accommodate these different preferences and offer slightly different paths or functionality options depending on the user.
Annotate features. Small comments will make it clear what each piece of the wireframe is for.
Maintain consistency across wireframes. Create and follow patterns for common elements like headers, navigation, and buttons. This establishes a foundation for your final UI design system.
Use appropriate levels of fidelity. Choose the right level of detail for your current design phase, so you don’t invest time and money in designing unnecessary details.
Incorporate user feedback early. Test your wireframes with real users before moving to high-fidelity designs. Even simple paper prototypes can reveal major usability issues that are easier to fix early on.
We typically spend a lot of time on wireframes, because we believe that getting them right is a crucial step in the UX design process. Wireframes can really make or break the overall experience of an application.
During the wireframing process, we try to organize information so that it is clear which parts are most important. We also ask our clients what their main goals are, and if they have any KPIs they want to target. This information helps us decide what goes where.
Wireframes are a staple of our work. Practically every digital product will require ample time spent building them up front. In our project for Mortar, a platform that helps companies decarbonize, we took the complexity of the founder's vision and simplified it into a set of intuitive wireframes for their MVP.
Do you have an idea for a new app or website? We work with a wide variety of startups and would love to talk with you!
