Why wireframe a website

Here are some things to avoid when you are creating your responsive wireframes. Emphasizing color and design: Wireframing is for deciding the layout and location of elements.

Working in grayscale helps maintain focus on the primary function of the process , which is to finalize the layout, not the design. Starting with simple, low-fidelity wireframes is probably better and easier to work with if you decide to change and move things around.

Too much detail: You can always add more detail to show to your team and clients later in the process. But including too much in the beginning may add confusion. Drawing on paper is always a great place to start and rough sketches allow you to come up with new, more interesting solutions. Keep the fidelity low and focus on making something that others will collaborate around. All of that gathered information from stakeholder interviews, content audit, and research are all important pieces of your site that will help prioritize elements on your page.

Wireframing is an important communication tool in any web or app project. It gives the client, developer, and designer an opportunity to walk through the structure of the website without getting sidetracked by design elements such as colors and images. For me, I believe that building a simple wireframe will save time in the long run and ease the development process for the designer, developer, and client.

The following is a list of some of the great benefits of wireframes:. Improving the User Experience. Do not use colors. If you would typically use color to distinguish items, instead rely on various gray tones to communicate the differences.

Do not use images. Images distract from the task at hand. Use only one generic font. Typography should not be a part of the wireframing discussion. Within the wireframes, however, you may still resize the font to indicate various headers and changes in the hierarchy of the text information on the page. Ethnography is a study through direct observation of users in their natural environment rather than in a lab.

The objective of this type of research is to gain insights into how users interact with things in their natural environment. Tree testing is a way of evaluating a proposed site structure by asking users to find items based on the sites organisation and terminology. This online test only displays the navigation links and removes any additional clutter.

Reveal quick wins for today and a user-centred way forwards for tomorrow. What is wireframing? Wireframing is essential in UI design A wireframe is a layout of a web page that demonstrates what interface elements will exist on key pages.

A wireframe is much easier to adapt than a concept design It is quicker and cheaper to review and amend the structure of the key pages in a wireframe format. Wireframing takes place early in the project lifecycle Often used to complete the User-Centred Design process, wireframes are also used at the beginning of the design phase.

Advantages of Wireframing One of the great advantages of wireframing is that it provides an early visual that can be used to review with the client. Disadvantages of Wireframing As the wireframes do not include any design, or account for technical implications, it is not always easy for the client to grasp the concept.

Conclusion Wireframes should be used early in a project to get user and client approval on the layout of key pages and the navigation. You may also like Become an Insider How to create sketched wireframes in Axure The beginning of the end for the Hamburger icon?

How to improve your e-commerce basket — usability insights from top 20 retailers. More UX Methods Questions. What is usability testing? Read more. What is user centred design? What is a website prototype? What is user requirements capture? What is customer profiling? What is card sorting? What are user journeys? What are focus groups? What is remote usability testing?

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