Wireframes and prototypes are increasingly essential for web design, especially when you’re designing responsive, dynamic websites geared toward user experience.
Creating wireframes and prototypes ensures that every aspect of the web design is tailored to your—or your client’s—expectations and business needs. The process also allows for complete control over web customization so your website doesn’t look like every other website out there, but is a fully personalized site dedicated to functionality and usability.
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So what the heck is a wireframe?
Wireframes are basically conceptual sketches or blueprints of what you want a website design to look like. As any UX designer knows, coding a website from scratch takes time and effort, so wireframing enables you to plan out the site ahead of time so that you can see how all of the elements you want to include work together. Creating a wireframe of your website without finalized code not only saves you and your clients time and money, but also helps you polish the components and structure of your website in the initial design states so you don’t have to go back and fix larger issues later in the process.
Creating wireframes also breaks UX design down into manageable chunks, making the design process more efficient and enhancing your productivity. Because you can identify and solve problems easily in this step, it saves you and your clients both time and money.
What is a website prototype?
Web prototyping is just like creating a prototype of any other product—it’s the process of testing your interactive design. Before the coding process is complete and the site goes live, web designers build a build a fully functional model of the website that can be used to test out interactive features and elements.
One of the major benefits of prototyping is that it enables users to actually test the site and provide feedback, helping you identify usability issues straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
Much like wireframing, prototyping helps you identify problems with content, structure and usability before the site is live and before fixing problems becomes more of a challenge. It streamlines the development process, reducing the time it takes to repair any issues and therefore cutting costs.
Any good UX designer knows all about the importance of creating wireframes and prototypes. If you’re looking to break into web design or perfect your web development skills, Wireframes and Prototypes for Interactive Design will help you optimize your time and create better, more functional websites suited to user experience.
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