Wireframing

Imagine building a house without a blueprint. The process would be confusing and inefficient, and you would waste a lot of resources if you discovered issues later on and had to knock down walls to fix these problems.

Building a website or app without a wireframe can invite similar chaos. By sketching out the rudimentary elements of your design right from the start, you can give your project a sense of direction and provide everyone on your design team some much-needed clarity.

Wireframing is the process of creating a blueprint for the structure of a website or app. Unlike a full mockup, which includes colors, icons, text, and other stylistic elements that wind up in a final design, a wireframe is just a black-and-white skeleton.¹ Designers use wireframes to experiment with different page layouts before spending time on design details. As such, wireframing occurs early in the development process.

Unlike a polished design, the main focus of a wireframe is functionality. When designers are wireframing, they’re not focused on the appearance of the finished product, but on how it functions. They’ll use wireframing to rearrange buttons, text fields, images, and menu items to determine the best possible layout for users and optimize the user experience (UX). During wireframing, designers consider the path users take to complete tasks and ensure page content is positioned correctly to maximize usability.

Rather than fleshing out the entire design right from the beginning, starting with a wireframe ensures the user interface (UI) is simple and intuitive in its most basic form.

Notably, wireframes don’t have to be technical—you can create a website wireframe with a whiteboard or pencil and paper. However, today’s digital wireframing programs make the process incredibly efficient, allowing designers to move and scale elements with the click of a mouse.