High-Fidelity Wireframes: the Smart UX practice for Website Designing

Whether you build a house or an apartment, a blueprint is a must. Similarly, if you are designing a website or an application a wireframe is necessary to design and analyze the layout.

Designing a layout holds a great relevance; it allows the web designers to decide the best navigation structure for a website.

Understanding the term ‘Fidelity’

Wireframes, you can say is the lifeline of website designing process. We have heard a lot about numerous wireframes and their uses in building a website. The preceding terms high and low represents nothing but the ‘degree of similarity’ with the final object.

The Importance of Wireframes: What are High-Fidelity Wireframes?

• Only UX
  • While working with wireframes, designers will not get distracted towards UI elements, they will be completely focused towards designing the UX of a website.
• Consistency in Data Demonstration
  • Also, the wireframes allow web designers to maintain a consistent visual language, like each element of that website will be represented through particular designs thus giving a good track of every element.
• Visual Hierarchy
  • A hierarchy is created based on the importance given to particular element. Similarly, with proper visual hierarchy, the web designers can easily arrange the content of a website.
  • Before explaining about high-fidelity wireframes, let me give you an overview of low-fidelity wireframes.

Low-Fidelity Wireframes: Let’s Know the Basics

You can call these wireframes as one the most basic representation of a website. These wireframes, actually, do not entirely deliver the final appearance of a product.

Screen layouts, sectional hierarchy, dummy content, so basically you can say low-fidelity wireframes give a rough sketch about the whole website.

High-Fidelity Wireframes: Let’s Know the Difference

Coming to the high-fidelity wireframes, these wireframes give us a completely different view of the website. We can easily say that high-fidelity wireframes add life to the dull blueprint of a website. In better words, at the end of work, we will be having a dummy website in our hands.

The actual content, specific image dimensions, proper typographic choices, well, a person will definitely have a clear cut idea about the appearance of his website.

I cannot exactly say that high-fidelity wireframes give a complete visual package of the final product; at least one would get a distinct understanding of the final objective.

Why the confusion b/w Wireframe and Prototyping

I first thing that I have to make clear about these two words are, they are not SYNONYMS!!! Shocked? It is true and, it is necessary that we clear such assumptions before we start with something like this. My bad, I didn’t bring in this earlier in this post, but still, it’s never too late.

Now, in the next few lines, I’m going to speak more about these two misunderstood words.

By now you should have got a faint idea about the concept of wireframe, but after reading the word prototype I’m definite that you will be again confused.

Wireframe:

• Ok, let’s play a quiz now, so what is a wireframe? I’m sure you will be dying to answer this one, but still, I will take the lead. ‘A wireframe is a visual representation of a website that includes a set of gray boxes, or in other words the low-fidelity representation of a website.’

Prototype:

• The actual design representation of the final product, a prototype allows the web designers to make final changes before the actual development starts.

Every web designer may have his own view, but if we sum up all these facts then it is necessary that every choice should be made by the time and budget limitations.