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Why you shouldn’t skip your wireframing
Recently I started seeing a trend where fellow designers skip wireframing/low-fidelity-mockups and jump straight into their UI work. While for “some” tasks this might be okay, I believe for majority of your tasks, this will hurt your final design.
First, what do I mean by wireframing?
When I say wireframing, I am not really talking about fancy wireframes built pixel perfect with nice colours and everything, like the stuff you see on Dribbble.
What I am talking about is any kind of quick sketch of the layout. How you create it is completely of your own choice, you can use pen&paper, Sketch, Balsamiq Mockups etc. The important part is this should be something that you can create super quick, modify as needed, and will not feel bad for throwing it out if it doesn’t work.
Wireframes should be a way to express the overall idea you have for a page or interaction. It is more about how it should work, rather than how it should look like.
Why do you even need wireframes?
If you don’t do it properly, wireframes might feel like a redundant additional step that takes up valuable time between your ideas and your final designs. However, the reason we make wireframes is not just to have a skeleton for the UI design, but to be able to quickly iterate, modify and get feedback on your design.
When you ask people for feedback, you get very different responses when you show a wireframe vs. when you show a polished UI design. Wireframe encourages people to comment on how things actually work, how the screens connect and what the structure of the page looks like. Whereas the UI design makes people think about the colours, the overall feeling of the page, how the content fits in, how the spacing is done etc.
I am not saying one feedback is better than the other. The thing is, you need both of these to create a successful design. So you should make use of both types of feedback to improve your design.
