Best practices for Wireframing

Wireframing is an important part of developing a system interface which gives a rough idea to the designer that how the interface will look like. Wireframe also gives you a way to explore problems at upstream which you have never thought of(or missed during the requirement discussion).

If problems are detected at upstream it will always save implementation time. Success in delivering quality user interfaces depends on making a carefully planned series of small mistakes in order to avoid making unplanned large mistakes. Exploring four design alternatives and discarding three of them amounts to making three small mistakes. Not doing enough iteration in drawing wireframes and implementing the design three times amounts to making three large mistakes.

Wireframes should not just present the information or the action tools but also put them in a way that is usable. Focusing on improving usability is important because in the fast-moving environment users have very less time to focus, mostly because there is always an alternative to something that you are proposing.

Below is the list of points, which are important to consider when wireframing.

Quantity over quality

Just make sure that you remember that your goal is to get all of those ideas out of your brain and on to paper. The wireframe should not be perfect but in multiple iterations, it must have all possible designs which were locked in your imagination. Once you have a large set of designs, extracting ideas and generating the quality interface becomes easier to achieve. And practically, the last wireframe which you might have designed will be the best wireframe which should have covered all the concerns and requirements.

Keep moving forward

Avoid spending a lot of time tweaking an idea to get it just right. Remember your goal is to dump all the imagination thoughts on the paper and if you will spend more than enough time in drawing just a single design, you might miss some of the valuable thoughts.

The more the joy

When you are generating wireframes, don’t stop at five or six. Keep iterating till you run out of thoughts of the design.

Don’t draw the same thing 50 times

Try your best and push your brain to produce concepts that are as different from each other as you can manage. Remember that this is the brainstorming stage, so there are not any bad ideas. Go crazy, think outside of the box.

Keep them when you are done

If you can, it’s a good practice to save your thumbnails for future reference. As you proceed further into the project, you might want to look back on them.

Do you have any thoughts? Post them in comments.