By Marcelo Perez Izco, Senior Digital Creative at Wrapped Agency
How wireframing helps marketers, designers and developers make better decisions before a website is built.
A product page can look fantastic. Beautiful photography, strong branding, polished design. But if a customer can’t work out which option to choose or what they’re supposed to do next, none of that really matters.
This becomes particularly obvious when buying something involves several decisions, with each choice affecting the next. The problem often has very little to do with how the page looks. It’s about the order of the information, what customers need to understand and how the journey works.
These are the sorts of problems I like to tackle through wireframing.
As a Senior Digital Creative at Wrapped, I work across website design, UI/UX and front-end development. One thing I’ve learned is that getting the structure right early can make an enormous difference to the finished website.
For marketers commissioning a new website, or looking to improve an existing one, wireframing is an opportunity to challenge how the experience should work before time and budget are committed to visual design and development.
What should a wireframe actually achieve?
A low-fidelity wireframe removes most of the visual detail. There’s no need to worry about the final colours, photography or typography. Instead, you can concentrate on the information hierarchy, page structure and how someone moves through the website.
It gives everyone involved a chance to answer some important questions. What does this page need to achieve? What information does the user need before making a decision? Is the next step obvious? And does the journey make sense?
These are UX design questions, but they’re also marketing and commercial questions. A website might need to generate enquiries, encourage bookings, support online sales or help people access information. The structure should support that objective.
Nielsen Norman Group highlights an important benefit of low-fidelity design: when something looks unfinished, people are generally more comfortable questioning it and suggesting changes.
I’ve found that useful when working with clients and colleagues. It’s much easier to discuss whether a page makes sense when nobody is distracted by the colour of a button or the choice of imagery.
A real example: designing a product configurator
One project I worked on involved redesigning a page on an existing garden shed retailer’s website. The aim was to improve the purchasing experience and make it easier for customers to choose the right product.
Buying a shed isn’t necessarily straightforward. Customers might need to choose construction options, finishes and other specifications, with some decisions affecting what comes next.
Working alongside a colleague who had more detailed knowledge of the client and its products, I developed wireframes for a step-by-step configurator.
Rather than presenting customers with every option at once, we explored a wizard-style journey that guided them through the decisions in a logical order.
Wireframing allowed us to work through the sequence, question how different options should be presented and make changes before committing to the finished design.
Trying to solve all of that directly in high-fidelity design would have been considerably more difficult.
It also highlighted something that’s easy to underestimate when planning a website: every design decision has implications beyond the design itself.
The configurator needed images showing different combinations of product options. Producing those assets became a substantial task, much of which happened during development.
Looking back, that was something we could have identified and planned for earlier. The wireframes showed us how the experience would work, but they also gave us an opportunity to understand the content and asset requirements that came with it.
That’s a useful lesson for anyone commissioning a website. A seemingly simple user experience can involve a surprising amount of work behind the scenes.
Why wireframing matters in complex and regulated sectors
The same principles apply well beyond ecommerce.
At Wrapped, we design websites and digital experiences for organisations operating in healthcare, financial services, fintech, property and other complex sectors. In these industries, the order in which information is presented can be particularly important.
On a healthcare website, someone might be trying to understand a condition, find a service or access support. The journey needs to be clear and accessible, particularly when visitors may be worried, unfamiliar with the terminology or unsure what to do next.
In financial services and fintech, websites often need to explain complicated products, guide customers through applications or help people understand their options. Wireframing provides an opportunity to establish where explanations, eligibility information and relevant disclosures belong before the visual design is developed.
For property websites, customers might be exploring different developments, comparing house types or arranging viewings. Clear navigation and well-structured enquiry journeys can make it easier for people to find the information they need.
These aren’t simply design considerations. They connect directly to audience research, website strategy and conversion optimisation.
If you understand what people are trying to achieve, what questions they’re likely to have and where they might get stuck, you can design a more useful experience from the beginning.
Getting the right people involved early
One of the biggest advantages of wireframing is that it brings different perspectives into the conversation before the design is too far advanced.
On the shed configurator project, my colleague’s product knowledge was essential. I could explore how the experience should work, but understanding the products and the relationships between different options helped us make better decisions about the journey.
The same applies to other projects. A healthcare specialist might identify information that needs to appear at a particular point. A financial services team might highlight an important disclosure or approval requirement. A marketer might explain which actions are most valuable to the business.
And developers need to understand how the proposed journey is expected to behave.
The shed configurator was ultimately built by a developer working directly for the client. That reinforced the importance of communicating the structure and logic clearly, particularly when design and development are handled by different teams.
Wireframes can help establish that shared understanding, although more complicated interactions may also need annotated flows or prototypes.
It’s much easier to question the order of a process or identify a missing requirement at this stage than after the website has been built.
Designing websites for different markets
Wireframing is also useful when websites need to serve international audiences.
A website designed for the UK may need to accommodate different languages, content requirements, customer expectations or regulatory information when adapted for other markets.
Something as straightforward as translating a heading can change how much space a layout needs. More complicated journeys, such as financial applications or healthcare service enquiries, may require different steps or information depending on the country.
Thinking about these requirements during wireframing helps teams understand where a website needs flexibility rather than assuming the same structure will work everywhere.
For marketers managing international websites, it’s worth involving local market knowledge early, before decisions about the user journey become difficult to change.
Can AI speed up wireframing?
There are now tools that make the initial wireframing process considerably quicker.
I’ve started using Relume on more recent projects to generate initial page structures that I can bring into Figma and develop further.
It’s useful for getting started, particularly when exploring different page layouts. But the results can be generic, and they don’t always account for specialised content or more complicated interactions.
That’s where experience and judgement still matter.
A tool can suggest a layout, but it doesn’t necessarily understand why a customer might struggle with a particular decision, what information a regulated business needs to communicate or how a complicated product configurator should behave.
The technology can speed up the process, but it doesn’t remove the need to understand the audience and the business.
What wireframes can’t tell you
Wireframing is an important part of website planning, but it doesn’t solve everything.
A static wireframe won’t fully demonstrate how interactions behave, how a design responds across different screen sizes or whether people can successfully complete a task.
It also doesn’t replace accessibility evaluation, content planning, prototyping or user testing.
Just because everyone in a meeting agrees that a journey makes sense doesn’t mean customers will find it easy to use.
For more complicated websites, particularly those involving multi-step applications, product configuration or sensitive information, testing a prototype with real users can reveal problems that aren’t obvious to the project team.
The earlier those issues are identified, the more opportunity there is to address them before development.
What marketers should check before approving wireframes
If you’re commissioning a website, I’d encourage you to look beyond whether the wireframes contain all the pages you’ve requested.
Think about whether the experience actually works for the people who will use it.
A few questions worth asking are:
- Does each page or step have a clear purpose, and is the next action obvious?
- Does the order of information reflect how customers make decisions?
- Have the people who understand the audience, products and services contributed to the structure?
- Have content, imagery, accessibility and any regulatory requirements been considered?
- Do the developers understand how the journey is supposed to work?
- Would testing with real users help validate any important assumptions?
You don’t need an elaborate wireframing process for every website. A simple page might only need a quick review, while a complex application or configurator could take several rounds of refinement.
The important thing is using the process to make decisions, rather than treating it as another box to tick before the finished designs appear.
For me, that’s the real value of wireframing. It gives everyone involved a chance to understand, question and improve the experience while there’s still time to change it.
A great-looking website is important, but getting the journey right is what makes that design genuinely useful.
References
- UX Prototypes: Low Fidelity vs High Fidelity — Nielsen Norman Group
- Wizards: Definition and Design Recommendations — Nielsen Norman Group
- Wireflows: A UX Deliverable for Workflows and Apps — Nielsen Norman Group
- Structuring forms — GOV.UK Service Manual
- Using the Relume Figma Plugin — Relume documentation
