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Wireframes

Contemporary Wireframes on Mobile Landscape

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/

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The Difference Between Wireframe, Mockup and Prototype

Creating designs for your application is not a simple task or one time action. To design a mobile or web application is not purely a technical work, it requires lot of imagination, conceptualization, and creativity to put together with technology. There are lots of iterations required to make an application functionally accurate and visually appealing. Research says that in development cycle, designing itself takes 30% of the development time, which is a big stack of investment a company is doing for their project. Therefore, designing scores to be a critical part of an application development. And to make it precise and exclusive to meet your requirements, it is necessary to follow best industry standards pertaining to create wireframes, mockups, and prototypes. There is huge misconception about the meanings of wireframes, mock-ups, and prototypes. More or less they are considered as same to serve a purpose of showing a sample design. Even if you do a research over internet to find the definition. There are ample of results giving different meanings to all the three terms. However, there is a difference between wireframes, mockups, and prototypes, and it serves a very critical element of designing an application. This article is focused on explaining the key factors that creates a difference between wireframes, mockups, and prototypes; which will make it easy for app designers to implement while mobile application development. Wireframes First of all, let us understand what wireframes are meant for. When you intend to design a mobile application or a web application, you will first need a sketch of how each page is going to look like. It is important for a designer to be conceptually clear on what the business requirement is, and how the functionality will be delivered. Only based on business concepts, a designer can define the application flow and a first draft of design, that has a sketch of how it will look like, what buttons will be there, what fields will be there, etc. That is what wireframe is meant for. Wireframe is a visual illustration of a web page, which showcase how each component of the web page is organized and how it will look like. The page layouts are static and it is to guide the development team for starting the developments. Wireframes are generally part of software requirement specification documentation, to guide developers as well as testers on what the requirement is. The wireframes are not required to have specific fonts or color, they are static draft layouts of the design. It is easy to make an initial draft to bring clarity on what is required. You do not need to add logo or pictures at this stage. You can simply add the blocks with name that this will be place or logo or banner. Mockups Mockups are more alive pictures. They are visually more appealing, has colors, fonts, themes, buttons, logo, etc. At this stage labels of the fields, notes, font types, navigation menu, etc. are specified in the design. A mockup is also static page layout, but it showcases how the final product will look like. It is an exact representation of the how the mobile app will look like or web pages will look like. The objective of creating mockup designs is to review the final design before launching it. This is to prevent any change requests in design after launch. Therefore it is a key step for an application designer to make mockups of the final design. Mockups are not just used by the internal development and testing teams, but can also be shown to the client as it depicts how the final product will look like in detail. Prototype Prototype is when we are shifting from User Interface (UI) design to User Experience (UX). Prototypes are created for the users to operate an application, perform its actions. It helps users to understand how the the functionalities in an application will work. How user will interact with the interface designed. A prototype is intended to give users an experience of interaction with the application. At this stage of designing a mobile app or web page, gives users an experience of how the system will perform. Users can click on the buttons, enter field information, and check the operational flow as per requirements. It allows users to test the prototype application and if there are any loopholes in the designed flow, it can be identified before final publishing and can be corrected. Mockplus and FluidUI are rapid prototyping tools to make interactive prototypes on mobile, web as well as desktop, which would be a great help for UX/UI designers, software engineers, product managers and developers of any level to visualize their ideas much faster and easier. After learning the fundamental difference between the wireframes, mockups, and prototypes, it is important to decide the milestones of what is to be delivered at what stage of the project delivery. Application designing always starts with wireframe designing, and further goes to developing mockups and prototypes, depending on the complexities of the mobile app or web app. After all designing an app needs a stretch of ideas and creativity along with technological efforts. Hence, it is recommended to follow these standards to reduce redundancy or iterations in application designs at the time of app launch. Spending time in the initiation planning wireframes, mockups and prototyping, can later save lot of time in developing and implementing the application as per business requirement. Blog Source- https://www.mindinventory.com/blog/the-difference-between-wireframe-mockup-and-prototype/

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