What is Wireframing?
Wireframing is a crucial part of the UX design process. It is a practice of designing the information hierarchy and layout for a website, mobile app, or other software products. This process focuses on user interaction with the product while making it convenient for them to navigate through the product.
Wireframing is a way of planning and implementing how users interact with your app interface by positioning different design elements. A good wireframe design ensures that users can perform certain actions without the distractions of colors, options, fonts, images, and other elements.
This process focuses on how the designer or client wants the user to process the information on a mobile app, based on the user research performed by the app development company.
Do Your Research
Wireframing is a part of the UX design process, but it doesn’t need to be designed in the first step. The process typically starts with a basic sketch on paper. However, before you pick up your pen, you should do your research first. Learn about your audience. Make a note of your core requirements and build user personas. Support your user research with further industry and competitors’ research. Studying similar products would give you an insight into the prevailing UX trends and practices in the market.
This, as a result, helps you in reviewing your own internal design guidelines. In case you are designing a new feature, you can do your research outside your industry as well. For example, if you are developing a mobile app and adding the data visualization feature in your performance tracking app, you can take a look at some fitness app. It will add creativity and a better user experience to your design.
Devise Your App’s User Flow
To keep your wireframes clean and easy to understand, you should clearly know about the number of screens and the flow in your application. Having no idea of the number of screens and where your users will be coming and landing on the app can lead you to a great mess.
A good user flow relies on good information architecture. It ensures that users can easily perform certain tasks on your app without sending a lot of messages to your customer service. This contributes to lower levels of frustration in users, which as a result, leads to more satisfaction and trust. Consequently, your mobile app will have more potential for usability, revenue, and profit.
Things to Consider while Drafting your App’s Interface
There are a few things that you should take well care of while creating your app wireframe. Let’s take a quick look.
- Organize the content flow in a way that supports your end goal.
- Keep the most important information most prominent.
- Draft the right place for your main message.
- Keep the first page of your app engaging for users when they first open your app.
- Arrange content according to the general expectations/intuitiveness of our audience.
- Add important buttons and touchpoints to encourage users to take action.
Keeping these points in mind, create a few sets of your app screens. Sit in teams and have a talk on usability and user flow. Use a whiteboard and draw your wireframes to have a collaborative session. If you get a positive answer to the question that your design meets the usability of your audiece need, you are good to go.
Add Some Details
The first step in wireframing is to map out your app flow and how different screens are arranged. Once you devise the flow of your app screen, it’s time to add details. Adding information is necessary to convert wireframes into prototypes.
It’s important to add details in a natural and intuitive manner. A user has a natural tendency to process information from left to right of a page or a screen. Take care of little details and fcators that make a strong impact. Make sure the usability and convenience are taken well care of. For instance, place the navigation bar at the top left of the screen right next to your app logo. Place the searc bar on the top right. Taking care of usability conventions is important because users are trained to see things in a certain way. chnaging things to their place can hardly add to your creativity but definitly makes it difficult to perform an action on your app. keep things simpler and easier to make it effortlessly quick for your users to perform any task.
Wireframe functions as a skeleton of your mobile app, while the details and content help to give body to your app. To offer the best features and functionality, make sure you add the right element at the right position.
Turn Your Wireframes into Prototypes
When you complete the draft of your wireframe, now is the time to start building prototypes for your app screens. You can make use of some easily available tools, including Proto.io to Adobe XD, Framer, Sketch, and Figma. These tools can help you build wireframes import them to prototyping tools for moving on to the next step. By using tools like InVision and UXPin, you can turn your wireframes into prototypes.
Now that you know about the basics of wireframing. Let’s learn about some tools for Wireframing.
The Best Tools For Wireframing
You can find several free tools in the market to build wireframes & prototypes. You can take a look at a few of them and choose the one that best fits your need. the first and foremost tool for wireframing is “pen-and-pencil.” You can always use this tool for wireframing. However, some online tools are making it easier to do the job. Let’s have a look.
UXPin
UXPin is a wireframing tool with a wide range of functionalities. By using this tool, you can easily build responsive clickable prototypes in your browser. This makes it one of the preferred choices for UX designers.
InVision
Another popular wireframing tool is InVision. This tool allows you to collect feedback from your team and testers. The tool is free to use and allows designers to turn wireframes into clickable mockups.
Wireframe.cc
Wireframe.cc is a tool that helps you build wireframes very quickly directly in your browser. This tool is an easy alternate to paper and pen.
The Bottom Line
Do you want to learn more about Wireframing or want to build an app with the best UI/UX concepts? AppVerticals is a professional mobile app development company with a decade-long experience in design ad development.
