The Importance of Wireframes

In web design planning, you need to somehow see in advance how the pages will scroll and how you can transition from one page to the next. What a wireframe will do is to allow you to view the whole site without getting distracted by details.

Once the screens have been designed in a basic outline, you will get a good feel of how things will work. It's now time to gather your team, stakeholders, and colleagues to get their feedback.

Here's why it isn't wise to ignore the wireframe stage:

• You won't have user-experience projection - If you skip the wireframe phase and go directly to the mockup phase, you will not have a good idea of how things will go in your site - and therefore you can't project or predict the kind of experience your users will have.
• There's no easy communication with stakeholders - Without a wireframe, you will have a difficult time explaining to them what you mean when you speak about light boxes, Google map integration, product filtering, etc. Naturally, investors would be hesitant about putting in their money if there are gray areas in the project.
• It's a way to check what's lacking - Creating wireframes will make you and your team get pushed for questions that revolve around usability. This is the time to ask about the website's ease of use, navigation placement, naming of links, and conversion paths. This is also the chance to pinpoint structural flaws that might bog you down in the future.
• Wireframes can save you time - They are time-saving tools in multiple ways:
  • You will save time because your designs are more calculated.
  • You will avoid proceeding with some of the parts of the design that you will later find out to be erroneous or wrongly implemented.
  • With wireframes, content creation becomes a lot easier.

Wireframes are a way for you and the team to understand clearly what your end goal is - what you want to build. In addition, these tools will allow you to think from the end-user perspective - in other words, what they might be able to experience when they go to your site.