What is a Wireframe?
A wireframe is a simple structural representation of your website or application. It is a static and low fidelity representation strictly used to understand how the elements on a screen should be laid out. This should be a visual representation of your personal understanding of the product. The wireframe is a very important element of interaction design. It helps you gather feedback, and allows you to gather approval from stakeholders at the early stages of the design process.
Paper Wireframes
Thanks to ever-evolving technology, we have many great tools for developing wireframes, however, many still believe that the best way to develop a wireframe is to draw it out on paper with a pen or a pencil. This type of wireframing is very effective in terms of defining the structure of an application quickly. These types of wireframes are usually black and white sketches that focus on the basic picture of the project. Typically, boxes and lines are used to define the individual UI elements of the page.
Many designers believe that paper wireframing is beneficial to digital wireframing because of many factors. The first factor is that this method requires less effort on the part of the designer. Paper Wireframing saves a designer the effort of learning the graphic design tools, and then putting their ideas into digital images. Because there is less effort taken in designing at this stage, businesses are better able to shape their products in the early stages of collaboration.
Another benefit is that this type of design is very easy to share with others on the design and development teams. It is very easy to print and distribute a paper design across a team to discuss. Changes can be made accordingly after a discussion, and archiving the design is a simple process of photographing the design and adding it to a digital board in a program like InVision.
Finally, many designers believe that paper wireframing is more cost-effective and less time-consuming than their digital counterparts. Paper wireframing is cheaper as most of the technical issues of application design can be solved on paper. When using a design program for wireframing, a designer may have to research how to achieve and implement a particular design pattern in a specific design program.
Digital Wireframes
Paper wireframes are very effective in the initial phases of product development when the main focus of the designers is to determine the structure of the product. Digital wireframes usually act as the second phase of the design, which adds both visual refinement and functionality to the design.
Why are Digital Wireframes Important?
Digital wireframes focus primarily on usability. This process removes the images and colors of a project, which allows designers to focus ideas such as a website’s ease of use, conversion paths, naming of links, navigation placement and feature placement. In addition, digital wireframing makes the design process iterative. Rather than combining concepts such as content, layout and functionality, each of these elements can be designed and tested individually.
While using paper wireframes are good to quickly and efficiently record ideas, it is important to eventually translate those ideas into a digital format, because creating a wireframe using digital tools will present a more realistic view of the actual product. Depending on the needs of the client and individual product, digital wireframes can be created in grey-scale or color. Digital wireframes also provide the added benefit of showing minute details such as the exact placement of elements on the screen, and how the individual screens are interconnected.
Popular digital tools used wireframing are Sketch, Balsamiq and AdobeXD. Each of the options require designers to invest significant time, require clients to increase their budget and require designers to provide highly technical skills. Despite the barriers to producing digital wireframes, they are beneficial to clients who may have difficulty visualizing a concept based on sketches on paper. In addition, when a wireframe has appropriate graphics, typography and proper spacing, testing of the design can be done.
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