What is a wireframe?
The standard wireframe is one of the key parts of every UX process that cannot be skipped. The wireframes are technically rougher than the standard ones. It is in sketch form, easier and cheaper. It should be used to give a detailed meaning to clients and stakeholders. Hence, it’s most optimal for designers in order to achieve a solution quickly.
Wireframes work on the overallpicture of significant user flow rather than detailing it. Hence, we don’t haveto take much time and effort to work on uncertain things before bringing them to design and development.
A good Website Design Company can help you solve your real problems by creating a great wireframe. But incase you want to create it by yourself, our Web Design Jacksonville experts will tell you six steps in wireframing.
Steps Involved In The Wireframing Process:
1. Do Your Research:
The most important and first stage of UX design is the process and not the wireframing. Before drawing a wireframe with pen and paper, you need to cover the basic and most crucial two steps, which are stakeholder interview and user research.
Stakeholder interviews help to establish the foundation for any project by providing valuable insights tha tmight be difficult- even impossible to obtain. And these insights guide flow to the project, like a business goal, technical constraints, usability problems, and even more. It focuses on collecting information from three main areas namely:
• User needs: How will the design help the user?
• Business goal: How will the design support the business objective?
• Technical limitation: What technical obstacle needs to be overcome?
While user research is the tool used to kick-start the design process. It focuses on extracting information from the targeted audience. It’s important to conduct research because it works on three main points such as,
• What the user feels about a website, application, product, or process.
• To know the user's wants, needs, and pain points.
• Speak directly to the user and get the response.
This helps to know your competitors and make you work hard and smart while implementing Website Design Ideas into reality.
2. User Persona:
After the long and lengthy procedure of user research, you will get all that quantitative and qualitative data from the users and stakeholders. Well, that’s all you have to keep in mind while creating Wireframes. But it will be a more time-consuming process, hence, it’s important to create a single sheet that will tell you the conclusion or common points of user research. This can help you to determine which feature is foremost on your site so that visitors can find what they need.
Persona makes the design task less complex,they guide the design process and can help you achieve the goal of creating the best user experience for your target user. It helps to understand users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals. We can call it a quick reference for user research.
In order to generate revenue, and develop sales strategies in detail, the designers should stop being in his shoes and get into the user persona’s shoes.
3. Make User Flow Chart:
The third step of wireframing is proper user flow. A user flow means a navigation map for the users that describes where users can explore your product. Your wireframing will look very messy if you don’t have an idea about how many screens will need an exact user flow. It’s important to understand how users will interact with your app or website, and the steps they follow to complete a task or achieve a goal on yourapp or website.
The user flow chart is also called an avigation diagram, activity flow, user interface flow, and task flow diagram. It can be said that it is the actual quality and experience of the path users take to accomplish a task. Wireframes will look more confusing without simple user flow.
4. Sketch Out Your Wireframe:
As you have gathered all the basicinformation earlier at this stage you can start creating a user flow intoreality. It means you can start creating a wireframe on a digital page or on a page. The wireframes which are created in black and white with the help of paper and pencil can easily be shared with clients and teammates. This is a stage where simple design ideas can come into reality.
A professional website designer does this on a whiteboard that helpthem to enhance the public explanation skills. It also helps them to create anddescribe the user flow easily as well as draw up the main movement of other initiatives quickly and smoothly. They also ask their team members or use a question; “Are we creating something usable that meets our audience’s needs?”
At this stage, you can even provide important detail about what exact information will be included. But at this stage keep yourself basic, and also make sure that it should be complete enoughto create a visual representation.
5. Perform Usability Testing:
So now you have your screens, userflow, and your ideas. With the help of the different tools on Google, you can share the application layout at the wireframe stage. You can share this layout of wireframe or low fidelity wireframe to your team members, group of potential users, or stakeholder. You can make a note of any issue and try to fix the issue.
However, there are many tools available that help you do more objective usability testing for your wireframe. Just because your web design team finds your wireframe easy doesn’t mean the average site users will too.
As usability totally depends on the users. You can make use of tools that will give you feedback on how average visitors recognize wireframes.
6. Create a Prototype:
After completing the wireframe testing, you have created an excellent UX design for your site and it’s time to turn it into a prototype. As we know “A picture is worth more than 1000 words” prototype is just like that. It has the basic functionality that can test out user flows more realistically.
A prototype is a sample or mock-up of the product; we wish to build. In simple words, a prototype is a quick model that explains actual plans for the final product, application, or website. It also demonstrates its core functionality. Prototyping has benefits such as a better understanding of the design intent, early feedback while developing a product, early changes to save time and cost, and validation beforedevelopment.
There are lots of slick tools outthere for prototyping from Proto.io to Adobe XD and Framer. Ask yourself that the product really solves its users’ problem or not? For that, only a prototype must be created and tested with prospective users and stakeholders.
Conclusion:
People think that a wireframe is just a simple single step, but they are often surprised to learn that wireframe is an explanation of many informal stages that includes research, user persona, user flow chart, perform usability testing, prototype, and many more.
You can hire any good website design company like Web Design Jacksonville that will help you to create a wireframe by using those above-mentioned steps. As we know they are an integral part of developing a website, we hope that this article will help you to create them. However, If you have any quries you can approach our Web Design Jacksonville experts.
