A common step in the UX design process is wireframing or prototyping. In short this is deciding about the placing of elements that you want to add. It’s a very important step. Why?

1. Planning is a key of success and systematically going through steps will create more successful design. With a good design plan, you will think about the purpose of the website and create a design which will reach its marketing goals. A nice design without planning makes a design often loose its potential. Decisions about what elements are most important, what your customers are looking for or what actions you would like them to make, on the other hand, give a strong basis.

2. Wireframes / prototypes give an overview on what the site will look like. Without colors and graphics, it’s an easy start to open up the communication concerning decisions and to test the design.
Whether a website menu goes horizontal or vertical, where pictures and text will be added, whether widgets or social media buttons will be added, etc… Especially if it concerns a bigger project a design with colors, graphics and pictures will easily lead to discussions about details, while the big picture is easily forgotten.

3. It saves time. Creating wireframes or prototypes before the final design is time saving. For example, if you design a website all ready with header, graphics and pictures and your customer is not happy with the layout, it will take much more time to redesign the website since you have to do it all again.

There are several good wireframing tools on the web. My favorites are Balsamiq, Cacoo and JustInMind. Balsamiq and Cacoo are wireframing tools, while JustInMind is a prototyping tool. Its advantage is that it’s dynamic and already interactive, unlike some wireframing tools. This makes presenting, discussing and testing much easier.