Possibly the biggest mistake in any development project is failure to plan. Recently, the owner of a prospective start-up told me that planning was unnecessary and a good developer could just start coding. This, I promise you, will end in tears.

Wireframing is one of the first steps in your planning process and arguably it’s one of the most important ones. This is when the idea starts to take shape as an application, becoming boxes and buttons that users will interact with. This article will take you through a wireframing process; who should be involved, the tools to use and tips to enable you to make better wireframes.

1) Be Clear About Your Objective
As a developer I can understand the temptation to jump in and start coding. Often the initial idea seems so simple that surely you could just sit down and bash it out? Unfortunately, projects are rarely simple and anyone with experience will know what a myriad of unforeseen issues and challenges await you if you go down this route.

A wireframe will help you identify many of these issues in a way that is time and cost effective. It is far easier to make changes to a collection of paper screens than after you have written a thousand lines of code.

The process also helps to create a better understanding of the application. Putting it down on paper raises questions and ideas and leads to changes.

The final output will be a blueprint from which designers, developers, architects and project managers will work and makes sure everyone is in sync.

2) Make it Functional, Not Pretty
There are variations in how wireframes are presented and this is reflected in the various tools available. Fundamentally it is about the functional parts of an application, e.g. that a page will have 3 text boxes and 2 buttons. Itâ