It has observed that many of the web and mobile app development companies eliminating wireframe development stage at all. They believe that prototypes serve their purposes. However, in practice, prototypes never take the seats of wireframes of different kind. There are many reasons behind that prototypes never can replace wireframe and the first one is the abilities of wireframes to do testing. By concept, wireframes just serve the outline of the final product done in hurried manner with perfectly imperfectness!
Today we are designing highly intricate and interactions rich mobile applications for various mobile platforms with their own native requirements and technologies. Therefore, early day’s sketches type or low-fidelity wireframes are inadequate, if we solely rely on them and not going to do mid-level fidelity wireframes or hi-fidelity wireframes at all. If I am not exaggerating to say that, modern mobile app development companies should practice all sort of wireframes of different levels using modern wireframe creation tools.
Tools for Wireframe Development
- Low-fidelity wireframes are of very primitive type so we can use just pen and paper to draw sketches. However, whiteboard practices are very fruitful when a big team is involved. Today many graphics tablets in computers or tablet devices with appropriate software are fine alternative to incorporate your colleagues or clients in person or online.
- Mid-fidelity wireframes or say mockups are demand somewhat details so Balsamiq Mockups or Axure like wireframe creation software are useful in modern days. Unlike sketches, mid-fidelity wireframes have precise and final content in textual as well as image forms. They have precise UI copy with system messages, navigation items, various labels, and instructions included. Therefore3, many smart and seasoned front-end mobile app developers simply translate these mid-fidelity wireframes in to HTML-CSS or programming code without going to next high fidelity and prototyping steps.
- High-scale and high-end mobile app development demands enormous details and precisions in interactions and look and feel. Thus, gauging their interactivity is only possible with high-end wireframe producing software like Fireworks, Illustrator, OmniGraff, and alike tools, which are giving opportunity to create animated interactions between the screens and UI elements to break their complexities.
Fortunately, in recent era we have browser based wireframe development tools using HTML-CSS and some JavaScript or Media Queries to test your interactions and responsiveness of the mobile application in process. Twitter’s Bootstrap, Zurb’s Foundation, and similar software enables mobile app designers to mount grid based column system in minutes using code.
There are other certain advantages of modern browser based wireframe development tools such as:
- You can create basic layout with multiple options within the shortest time with low learning curve
- You can create responsive design and test their responsiveness either using resizing browsers or test on real devices by integrating the devices with your PC or Mac
- You can test your mobile app wireframes using natural capacities of browsers on real devices and with real touch gestures
- Since this browser based wireframe tools offer HTML-CSS and scripting options to make your wireframe interactions live and allow you to test on the web, you have real world and real user experiences
- These tools are opensource and almost free or cheaper in compared to many proprietary wireframe development tools so affordability is great point to attract developers to use them
No doubt, all the mobile app development companies are not adopting or have expertise in modern wireframe tools usage or practices so you have select your company with great care.
Blog Source- https://www.mindinventory.com/blog/contemporary-wireframes-on-mobile-landscape/
