Changing the Way We Do Wireframes
A wireframe is like the blueprint of a webpage, drawn using basic shapes and lines with limited colors and styles. It helps figure out where to put content, how to arrange it, and solve navigation and functionality issues in an easy-to-change format. When planning for a responsive website design, we can not continue to think through the wireframing process from a desktop only perspective.
However, we understand that changing the way we think about these layouts and choosing a new direction can be a little challenging. For a long time, we have been creating designs with fixed widths or a maximum width of 960px. Starting wireframing with a focus on mobile devices, or from narrow screens outwards, helps us decide what elements are most important on the website. It also guides us in thinking about which content is relevant for site visitors and how it can adapt to wider screens.
Benefits of Wireframing
Wireframing is a crucial communication tool in web and app projects. It allows the client, developer, and designer to go through the website’s structure without being distracted by design aspects like colors and images. For us, we 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 benefits of wireframes:
- Wireframes provide clarity to your projects, helping you address all interactions and layout requirements.
- Wireframes encourage clients to reflect on their actual needs, clarifying project goals and priorities.
- Keeping wireframes at hand simplifies the communication of your design ideas to your team, especially concerning responsiveness.
- Wireframes enhance the effective communication of your website’s main message and enable early feedback gathering.
- Wireframes provide developers with a clear understanding of the elements they need to code. How should the layout adapt for smaller devices? What is the hierarchy of the content? How does the navigation respond to smaller screens?
- Wireframes helps designers layout many sections of the website, resulting in a more fluid creative process.
Responsive thinking challenges our design options and certain approaches will not be easy to implement as others. Frequent collaboration among team members and the client is a must in your design workflow, not the exception. While it is common to go through several wireframe revisions with your colleagues and client(s), at the end of the day, our primary objective as a team is to consistently review and collaborate at every stage of the creation process until the website is live.
