A wireframe is not the same as a prototype but even seasoned design professionals can sometimes get the two terms mixed up.

It’s time to set things straight once and for all, since (semantics aside) the difference between a wireframe and a prototype is actually quite substantial.

Editor’s note: This is an article by Marcin Treder, CEO of UXPin.

Wireframe

A wireframe is a low-fidelity representation of a product’s design.

It has three simple objectives; the clear presentation of:

1. Main groups of information
2. Layout/structure of information
3. Core visualization and descriptions of user interface interactions

Wireframes, if properly created, serve as the backbone of the product.

It’s just like an architectural blueprint of a house: It states plainly and clearly what should go where.

Visual Characteristics of a Wireframe

The visual characteristics of a wireframe are very limited. Usually designers just use boxes, lines, and a grayscale color palette (to represent different levels of visual hierarchy in the design).

A simple vector wireframe

The majority of the final content — images, videos, text, etc. — is left out for later stages of the process. Often, these omitted parts of the interface are represented by placeholders. Images tend to be represented by crossed boxes and text with Lorem ipsum.

Benefits of Wireframing

Since wireframes are quick and cheap to produce — especially when you use dedicated wireframing software such as UXPin, Balsamiq, or Axure — they should be used right at the beginning of the design process.

There’s nothing better for gathering feedback early on than a solid wireframe.

Why?

Because people can focus more on function, information architecture, UX, user flow, usability, user interactions, and so on, rather than having these foundational aspects of a design being overshadowed by its aesthetics.

In addition, any required changes can be done quickly without too many tedious code and graphics-editor adjustments.

This video that my startup put together shows how easy wireframing can be.

Interactive Wireframe (or Clickable Wireframe)

Sometimes designers like to increase the fidelity of their work a bit to stress the importance of certain parts of the UI, as well as to present and quickly test the soundness of interactions between elements. A very popular way of doing that quickly is the creation of an interactive wireframe, also known as a clickable wireframe.

A more sophisticated wireframe designed using UXPin, a specialized wirefaming/prototyping tool

Interactive wireframes might be very helpful on the first presentation of a design to a stakeholder or client. If you’ve ever heard the classic question "What happens if I click this button?" you will have the answer right on your interactive wireframe. It’s impressive and engaging.

Being Careful with the Presentation of Wireframes

To a layman, e.g. our project clients or non-technical managers/employers, looking at a wireframe might be perplexing because wireframes might not have any resemblance to the final design at all.

Quick hand-sketched wireframing of an app’s user flow by Fernando Guillen

That’s why we need to take some time to explain what a wireframe is — and, more importantly, its significance within the design process — before we show it to individuals that are uninitiated to the concept of wireframes.

Prototype

A prototype is a mid- to high-fidelity representation of the final user interface.

The goal of a prototype is straightforward: Simulate the interaction between the user and the interface.

Whenever a button is clicked, the appropriate action must occur, mimicking the experience of a full product.

Visual Characteristics of a Prototype

When it comes to aesthetics, a prototype may closely resemble the final version of the product.

Basically, a prototype looks like the final product, but it just doesn’t have the nuts-and-bolts yet (i.e. HTML, CSS, JS, server-side programming, databases, etc.)

Interactive prototype designed in UXPin

Primary colors should be all set, key content (at least the essential pieces) must be present, IA should be demonstrated, and typography should, to a reasonable extent, represent the final version. Clicking on an interactive object should demonstrate its subsequent response.

Benefits of Prototyping

Why is prototyping important? Because prototypes are typically for testing a product with real users. Early testing of prototypes can save tons of money and time that would have gone toward developing the wrong interface and back-end product architecture. It is a good validation tool for the design and development of the product.

In addition, showing a prototype to users and asking them to go through some basic use-cases is amazingly insightful and inspiring for the entire team.

Instead of spending time coding the prototype, designers today can engage in a rapid and cost-effective prototyping process using software that I’ll talk about in a bit.

Any changes you need to make after user-testing can be implemented more quickly, without wasting the time of your engineers.

Design Workflow

Understanding the very nature of design, and the difference between wireframes and prototypes, is really just the entry point to the world of user experience design.

The magic happens when you’re able to combine the many pieces of the process into a cohesive, effective, and efficient workflow.

When I was managing a UX design department a few of years back, the biggest mistake I saw in our process was this: We treated wireframes as disposable and non-essential. So we would rush the process and we wouldn’t give the wireframing process the time and effort it deserves. They were too sketchy and messy to be used as a blueprint — the foundational backbone — of a solid prototype and the final product.

A Few Tips

• While wireframing, create reusable elements that can be edited so that when you’re in the prototyping stage, you can simply just refine those elements
• Make sure that when the wireframe is done, it represents the latest feedback from your teammates and stakeholders
• Use software to your advantage

Wireframing and Prototyping Software

I’ll end with a list of tools you can use to make wireframing and prototyping easier.

Below you’ll find some of the most popular wireframing and prototyping tools, including the one my company has developed.

Test them (most have some sort of free trial) and choose the weapon that fits you and your team best!

UXPin

We have over 900 UI elements ready to be used on wireframes and prototypes. Please feel free to ask me questions about it in the comments.

Proto.io

A very robust prototyping tool that can output HTML/CSS and demonstrate touchscreen interactions. Prototypes can be tested in actual devices.

Balsamiq

A very popular, longstanding, and easy to use wireframing app. Limited to static wireframing only though.

Moqups

Allows for wireframing in the browser.

Mockingbird

A simple wireframing tool. Product development stopped in 2010.

Axure

A wireframing and prototyping app that’s popular in the enterprise software sector.

Protoshare

Wireframing and prototyping in the browser.

InvisionApp

Allows you to build functional prototypes using your existing designs. You can’t draw anything, but you can add links between screenshots.

Related Content

• A Quick Introduction to Agile UX Design
• Quick Overview of User Experience for Web Designers
• Improving UX with Customer Journey Maps
• Related categories: UX Design and UI Design

About the Author

Marcin Treder is a UX designer, the CEO of UXPin, and author of several UX design books (such as UX Design for Startups).

The post Wireframes vs. Prototypes: What’s the Difference? appeared first on Six Revisions.

Everyone loves saving money, especially the US government. But could it really be as simple as switching fonts? Last week the media was awash with the story of 14-year-old student Suvir Mirchandani, who claimed that if the United States Government switched from using Times New Roman to Garamond on printed documents, it could save as much as $400 million.

The Pennsylvania student first began considering this idea while watching his school hand out multiple leaflets and trying to discern a way to save on the cost of ink when printing them. Then it was a natural leap to apply the same theory to not just his school, but the nation. Mirchandani posits that, due to the fact that Garamond is about 25% lighter and thinner than Times New Roman, it could save the US government $136 million in printing costs, and an additional $234 million could be saved if state governments also enacted this policy.

“Ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume.” – Suvir Mirchandani, in an interview with CNN.

But just how accurate is this estimate? Since Mirchandani’s theory has received international attention, it has been called into question by several typographers and design experts.

According to one article by John Brownlee, the major flaw in Mirchandani’s research is that he measured Garamond at the wrong size—understandable, given that font measurement can be incredibly confusing.

As Brownlee puts it in his article, “There is no guarantee that when you print out a font at 12-points that the letters will be 12-points tall. Only the line which the letters will be printed on will be 12-points tall.” If we were to switch to 12-point Garamond instead of Times New Roman, then, we would actually be sacrificing readability, as Garamond is the equivalent of a 10-point font rendered on a 12-point line. If the size were increased to improve readability, inevitably the cost of printing would increase to be comparable to the cost of printing Times New Roman.

Other issues brought to light regarding Mirchandani’s study have been the lack of specificity regarding which version of Garamond he used (though logical assumption points to the Monotype version of Garamond typically bundled with Microsoft operating systems) and the antiquity of the study he referenced in his claim regarding the cost of printer ink.

Mirchandani assumes that the ink for inkjet printers and the toner for laser printers (commonly used by government institutions) cost the same amount, when in reality toner is about half as expensive. Also, as noted by the aforementioned article by Mr. Brownlee, many US documents are still printed on a printing press, for which the price of printing is calculated not by ink used, but by the complexity of the page’s layout, and it is unlikely it costs as much as the $4,285 per liter assumed by Mirchandani.

Whilst it’s encouraging to see young minds so interested in the practical application of typography, the lesson we really learnt here, is that the only real way to save on printing costs is to go paperless.

Featured image/thumbnail, print image via Shutterstock.

Glober Font Family with 18 Weights – only $19!

The symposium "Discovery and Innovation: UMB's Commitment to Health Informatics and Bioimaging" will update the research and practice community on gains made in university health informatics, both here at the University of Maryland, Baltimore and other national exemplars.

• Time: May 5, 2014, 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
• Location: University of Maryland, Baltimore, Southern Management Corporation Campus Center, 621 West Lombard Street Room 349

Speakers Include

Paul Harris Director, Office of Research Informatics Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

Owen White, PhD Director, Center for Health Informatics and Bioimaging (CHIB) and Associate Director, Institute for Genome Sciences University of Maryland School of Medicine

Amitabh Varshney, PhD Director, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies University of Maryland, College Park

Mia Levy, MD, PhD Director, Cancer Clinical Informatics Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center

Kathleen Tracy, PhD Associate Director, CHIB and Director, Clinical Translational Research and Informatics Center University of Maryland School of Medicine

Get a first glimpse of UMB's Research HARBOR (Helping Advance Research By Organizing Resources), our interactive web portal to support research and innovation.

REGISTER NOW!

Our PhD students Ahmad Alaiad and Dari AlHuwail presented their work at the Poster Contest organized by the Information Systems Department at UMBC. The committee selected both students for the #1 place in the poster competition.

Tweet tweet… the birdie just got let out of the cage

Last week  the U.S. was busted yet again for a naughty coverta operation. This time it wasn’t Eric Snowden but the Associated Press who did the busting.

And the bustee was  ZunZuneo, a Cuban Twitter like service designed to promote free information sharing (and, oh, secretly incite a little political unrest along the way). 

ZunZuneo was backed by USAID, an American government aid organization. The team from USAID was using allegedly using ZunZuneo to collect information about suspected dissenters in order to “target outreach.” 

The service was a huge success, growing to about 40,000 subscribers, until the money dwindled off. USAID realized they were paying huge text messaging fees to the Cuban telecommunications monopoly and decided to call it quits to avoid a scandal. Looks like they got one anyways!

An article from the New Yorker explains another part of the problem here:

The case presents another troubling issue: ZunZuneo was being run through a private operator, a firm called Mobile Accord, that had won a financial contract from the U.S. government. This is consistent with a growing pattern in recent years, in which implementation of the most sensitive aspects of American security policy is increasingly handed over to contractors who are working for money, not necessarily for philosophical or even patriotic reasons.

The details of the story show that the project got slightly out of hand for USAID, growing more than expected thanks to Mobile Accord.

In the end, no one seems to be apologizing. The White House deemed that the operation was not “covert”  and was rather a “development assistance program.”

Whatever it was, it was pretty shady.

Is providing Twitter to Cubans is considered a form of “aid,” or a form of spying?