Compared to active concept designs, prototyping and wireframing simplify communication between interaction designers, project managers, and website developers. They represent the critical steps in web or mobile app development that detect loopholes during the early stages of design evolution.
Interaction designers conceptualize and create intuitive designs based on the premise that a prototype must be user-centric and run through the whole product design progress. Wireframing tools enhance the professional perspective and enrich the user experience for designers by directly influencing product usability.
The superabundant low-fidelity wireframing tools available today prevent choice phobia for designers while supporting quick & cost-effective design and rapid product iteration.
Convenient wireframing tools can define the content layout, design information, global and secondary navigation flow, and interface design to clients while reducing the room for errors.
Some core goals of designers met by wireframing tools include:
- Depicting the content and functionality of the pages before any further design changes.
- Communicating design concepts with clients efficiently.
- Establishing the information hierarchy of a site.
In this blog, our expert designers have hand-picked the top five wireframing tools that are quick, effective, and don’t break the bank to give you some exceptional results.
Adobe Experience Design (XD)
Adobe XD is one of our top picks to turn an abstract sitemap into a visual design for websites, apps, voice interfaces, and games due to its powerful features, easy-to-use at scale, and ability to leverage the power of seamless collaboration.
This tool runs on both macOS and Windows and needs an Adobe Creative Cloud to account for the basic and the paid versions.
Adobe XD helps in information gathering, embedding user empathy into designs, and expediting the development of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), in addition to offering a myriad of features that define its design roadmap.
| Feature Name | Description |
| Components | It helps create reusable design elements like vectors, character styles, colors, grids, and guides throughout single and multiple XD documents from a design system. |
| Multiple Interactions | It helps communicate the flow and feel of your user experiences using artboards without coding. Triggers and actions can be used to define the exact experience flow. Multiple prototype interactions help limit the duplicate artboards that bind together different prototyping flows. |
| Content-Aware Layout | Avoid manual tasks by creating and editing UI elements. Content-Aware Layout recognizes object relationships and makes automatic adjustments across object groups after edits. |
| Precision Design Tools | Align your experience with layouts, sitemaps, artboard guides, grids, flowcharts, and functional prototypes on-the-fly. |
| Coediting (Beta) | Multiple designers can design and iterate in the same cloud document simultaneously while tracking changes. Native applications that refer to a single source of truth without duplication or redundancy of work/documents can be developed sooner. |
Sketch
This intuitive, lightweight vector editor is designed to make collaborative prototyping convenient on the Mac OS.
Wireframes can be created quickly by combining artboards and vector design shapes without ready-made UI components. User-crafted assets, known as Symbols, are a compelling feature and reason to opt for Sketch. The vast array of customization options for Symbols offer reusability that is hard to beat.
You can breathe life into your designs by downloading third-party UI kits that support necessary element insertion. Lightning-fast prototyping helps convert ideas into ready-to-code project designs.
The vast array of available, free-to-download plugins also has the potential to enhance your Sketch app far beyond the capabilities of any other wireframing and prototyping product on the market to date.
This tool is a wireframing powerhouse for pixel-perfect precision, plug-in options, export presets, non-destructive editing, and code exports. It also houses integration support for Crystal, Lingo, Marvel, Overflow, Proto.io, Draft, Invision, UXPin, and Zeplin.
| Feature | Details |
| Cloud Inspector | It helps to move from design to development smoothly with few clicks. You can inspect elements, measure between layers, and copy attributes in the browser. |
| Smart Layout | Automatically resizes reusable components to create responsively wireframes. |
| Sketch for Teams | Helps share prototypes, feedback, and collaborate in a shared workspace. |
Other reasons why this tool is great:
- Powerful Vector editing.
- An intuitive and adaptive user interface.
- Reusable components for consistency in your product’s design system.
- Designers can test their brainstorms, convert static designs into interactive prototypes, and share data-driven designs in minutes.
- Automatically resize responsive components to fit content with Smart Layout.
- Customized workflows, plugins, and integrations to expedite localization
projects.
Balsamiq
If you need to implement quick, simple sketches, group various elements and layers together, and build a useful wireframe rapidly… then Balsamiq is the ideal choice. This tool reproduces the experience of notepad sketching on a computer.
Built for macOS, Windows, and browsers, Balsamiq has several drag-and-drop elements, each styled as a hand-drawing. Balsamiq works on the premise of keeping the mock-ups ‘intentionally crude and low-fidelity to encourage more feedback and quick iterations on POCs, or proofs of concept.
The interaction design is completely visualized from scratch. You can build interactive wireframes and prototypes the way you like with a simple drag-and-drop.
This design tool is effective for pre-interaction design phases. It helps focus on structure and content while avoiding lengthy discussions about colors and details. Balsamiq supports a zero-learning curve for designers and can be brought to quick meetings to discuss requirements, pitch ideas, and get quotes on the spot.
| Features | Details |
| UI Components and Icons | Built-in and community-generated UI controls and icons are made accessible. |
| Drag and Drop | Assemble elements for easy implementation. |
| Export to PNG or PDF | Share or present wireframes on the web, using images or interactive PDFs. |
| Optimized for Speed | Using Quick Add, wireframes can gain speed-to-scale. |
| Reusable Symbols | Create masters, templates, and reusable and customizable component libraries. |
| Interactive Prototypes | Create simple prototypes and link them for demos or usability testing. |
InVision
InVision is a quick and easy prototyping tool that lets you create and share interactive design mock-ups. It is a stand-alone design presentation app with all the progress visible inside one app.
Presenting designs is more efficient in InVision than sending out a. Pdf or screenshots. Mock-ups can be discussed inside the app by leaving comments about a point on the screen you discuss.
InVision lets you share a link to an interactive prototype that clients can toy with, like an actual website. Some the other important features that designers love include:
- The screens are designed to mimic an actual web browsing experience, with the designers having control over how others see their design.
- Feedback is made easier as clients have a better context of what they’re viewing.
- Comments and notes can be set to the point of discussion on the screen with a link.
- This also creates a to-do list of tasks that is easy to track and mark as changes are made.
- Mobile prototyping with gestures lets you create hotspot links for your screens that let your clients experience transitions, navigations, and movements realistically.
- InVision Sync lets you add and access screens on your local machine with version history.
- Hover states help add components like tooltips, menus, and hover states for buttons.
- The Live Share interface lets you collaborate in real-time with in-browser screen share, chat, and sketch capabilities.
- The VOIP live chat in-browser helps with anytime conference calls.
InVision Studio
This freehand wireframing app produces responsive designs for multiple screen sizes and team collaboration sketches on a whiteboard-like canvas.
InVision Studio is suitable for collaborating on basic wireframe sketches and developing more refined wireframes/prototypes. Design iterations are more manageable since it supports direct annotations on polished prototypes and real-time syncing with Sketch and Photoshop.
The built-in free design library offers ready-to-use UI components. The Inspect tool grabs relevant design specs and adds them to your documentation.
Other features include:
- Intuitive vector-based drawing capabilities with support for flexible layers on an infinite canvas, it’s easy to turn ideas into compelling designs because of:
- Powerful vector editing
- Flexible layer styling
- Pixel-perfect layouts
- Responsible for designing with the best-in-class layout engine to automatically design, adjust, and scale your vision to automatically fit any screen or layout.
- Rapid prototyping helps create and review fluid interactions and high-fidelity prototypes faster using:
- Point-and-shoot
- Mobile device mirroring
- Instant playback
- Implementing component hotspots (action points), animations, and interactions for all-inclusive wireframes
MURAL
This online whiteboard lets you organize thoughts & ideas efficiently, collaborate seamlessly, and interact with whiteboard sticky notes or post-its. You can scale visual collaboration by organizing lists, flowcharts, diagrams, frameworks, methods, and drawings to activate workflows and align your team. MURAL offers a digital workspace for visual collaboration for quick problem-solving.
Designers benefit from the speed and ease of use in creating diagrams in an agile environment. It supports tools to support more meaningful meetings and workshops. What you can accomplish with MURAL are:
- Plan for the future
- Brainstorm new ideas
- Evaluate what works best
- Design impactful prototypes
- Execute better decisions
- Leverage on customer empathy
Radiant Digital uses these wireframing tools to accelerate design workflows and create appealing designs through collaboration.
We implement wireframes in the following ways:
- Preventing designing in a silo by capturing an outsider’s perspective
- Implementing step backs to widen the perspective of our designs with new considerations
- Soliciting regular feedback from customers and developers
- Engaging in periodic wireframe reviews
- Applying innovation to low-fidelity wireframing to save time and costs
How do you handle wireframing? Do you start with low-fidelity sketches on pen and paper, or go straight to sketch and start on artboards? Let us know. We’ll be happy to share ideas.
