Wireframes are a vital component of the overall design and development process. They assist and guide you and your team through the often bumpy road of co-operation between various departments and specialisations. What’s more, they describe the structure of a website fast and easy, making it possible to give clients an accurate idea of what their future website will look like. In this article, I’d like to present some popular wireframe tools that allow you to create wireframe mockups for any website or mobile app with ease.
A wireframe is a visual guide that helps you communicate an idea to other people, whether they are stakeholders or potential users. Wireframes are created by software designers, product managers, marketers, content experts, information architects, graphic & UX designers, and many other individuals who are involved in building products along the “creation” phase of the product life cycle. This article focuses on drawing tools used for product design – wireframe tools.
Adobe XD
Adobe XD is a vector-based design tool that is designed to work in concert with other Adobe products, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Adobe Fonts, and Adobe Stock, and it’s one of the best paid tools on the market.
Adobe XD’s focus is on making the wireframing process as streamlined and easy as possible for the designers, with simple to use tools for creating site maps, flowcharts, and storyboards, as well as a full suite of prototyping tools.
As part of Adobe XD’s focus on giving designers tools that make rapid design possible, the platform also includes a repeat grid option, auto-animation and voice triggers, and a full set of collaborative working tools.
It’s also available for both Microsoft Windows and macOS.
The only downside to Adobe XD is that it requires an Adobe subscription to access all of its functionality.
Balsamiq Wireframes
A simple web-based tool available on both Mac and Windows, Balsamiq Wireframes is a simple and effective wireframing tool that lets designers create quick wireframe designs.
Compared to some of the more complete tools on this list, Balsamiq Wireframes could best be described as quick and dirty with its hand-drawn style harking back to the design drawn on a napkin idea.
Most of the elements in Balsamiq Wireframes are drag and drop, and designers have the option to use a drag-and-drop editor to arrange pre-built widgets, which really lowers the learning curve.
Plenty of example stretch and wireframe skins are available for different designs, such as desktop apps, mobile apps, and websites. Balsamiq Wireframes also boasts a huge library of UI elements.
The primary downside of Balsamiq Wireframes is that the lack of high-fidelity animations makes it unsuitable for doing any form of large-scale prototyping.
Lucidchart
Lucidchart is an excellent wireframe software choice for diagramming and data visualization that comes with an effective range of collaboration features.
The drag-and-drop functionality of the interface is set up to allow you to arrange elements so they work on mobile devices and websites. Lucidchart also includes a full UI shape library with all the basic elements you need, including search boxes, site map icons, and text editors.
If you’re new to wireframing, Lucidchart also has an extensive range of templates that are all sized and styled for both mobile and desktop — ideal for a faster design process.
To help you and your team work together, Lucidchart has an excellent set of real-time collaboration tools. You can create your own URL and use it to allow collaborators, stakeholders, and clients to comment on or edit your mockups.
When it comes to presenting your work, Lucidchart also includes a presentation mode and is fully compatible with Google Slides.
Moqups
For web
Price:
- Pro: $16 per 3 users, per month, paid annually
- Unlimited: $49 per month, paid annually
Hot Features in Moqups:
- Free plan comes with 5MB of storage
- Drag-and-drop user interface
- Integrates seamlessly with Dropbox, Google Drive, and Slack
Moqups is a web-based tool that allows you to build wireframes, mockups, and prototypes within the same environment. You can make designs such as wireframes, diagrams, flowcharts, sitemaps, mockups, graphs, and charts.
It has a built-in library with thousands of design elements and it’s easy to organize your projects with search and drag-and-drop features. It also permits integrations and facilitates collaboration with tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Slack.
Moqups offers a free plan with 1 project and 5MB of storage. Upgrading to the Pro plan for $16/month (billed annually) gets you unlimited projects for a single user.
UXPin
For web, macOS, and Windows
Price:
- Starter Plan: $0
- Basic: $19 per editor per month
- Advanced: $29 per month
- Professional: $69 per editor, per month
- Enterprise: email for custom pricing
Hot Features in UXPin:
- Advanced interactivity lets you more actively simulate the user experience
- Use built-in libraries to incorporate interactive elements, colors, and icons when you’re short on time
- Show conditional flow logic with UXPin’s embedded user flow capabilities
UXPin is a powerful prototyping and wireframing tool. With it, you can construct maps from a library of user interface components that you can combine into UX patterns, run tests on your wireframes and collect feedback from subjects, and collaborate with teammates in real-time.
Many of UXPin’s elements incorporate advanced interactivity, so you can more actively simulate the user experience as you build out your interface.
All plans allow unlimited prototypes and viewers, and each increasing tier enables more advanced features like conditional logic, variables, and design systems (style guidelines for your whole team).
Miro
Miro is a wildly helpful and popular tool, especially for ideation sessions, interactive presentations, design thinking workshops, and the like. But it’s uses don’t stop there! It’s an extremely versatile tool with wireframing capability!
Price breakdown
- Limited free version for unlimited team members
- Unlimited features, anywhere from $8-16/month for teams and businesses (they also have custom pricing for enterprise-level work)
Why you should use Miro for wireframing
We can’t overstate how versatile this tool is. If you want a free, easy to use tool that’s useful for all kinds of things and has collaboration superpowers, this is a great tool for you to try out. You can drop shapes, draw freeform, type, add digital sticky notes, or insert images and videos (and more) onto the infinite canvas. For teams, there are features for video chats, background music, and “summoning” (so if you need everyone to meet you somewhere on the Miro board, you can bring them to you). And that’s just scratching the surface.
If you don’t want to start from scratch, you can visit the Miroverse, where there are loads of templates (like this mobile app template) that you’ll find useful throughout the UX design process. You can download them or just use them for inspiration.
What’s not so great about Miro
Really, the possibilities are endless here, but if you’re aiming for interactivity (within the wireframe/prototype) or very high fidelity, you may hit some snags and need to find workarounds.
What other designers have to say about Miro
- “It’s intuitive to select and try out several canvas and interact and create relations between them. The design is seamless to understand. It is easy to share globally, and with several team members, of different projects in the free version.”
- “There are still some functionality improvements that can be made but I see that they are introducing new features almost daily. For example, yesterday I found myself trying to make the size of existing shapes to be identical but couldn’t do it so I put a new shape and started from scratch.”
Conclusion
Utilizing wireframes for your web design projects can help you streamline the design process while also helping you to better conceptualize your ideas before putting them into action. Wireframing is not just for websites though. There are wireframe tools designed for mobile app designs, whether you’re developing standalone apps or simply adding functionality to your existing website.