5 Reasons to Wireframe an App before Design or Development

App wireframes are blueprints that define the apps layout and functionality. The importance of having them right cannot be overemphasized. The reasons I say this:

1) Easily laying out the content and functionality
Wireframes enable you and the stakeholders or client to focus on the core functionality and content of the app rather than spending hours refining the asthetics.

2) Depicting Navigation
The wireframes let you clearly depict flowcharts to show the sequence of flow between screens. You can use the link feature in Balsamiq or use Omnigraffle or Lucid charts. All of them will help you achieve your desired purpose of showcasing the flow of the app even before its developed.

3) Iterating
Its easy to iterate on wireframes if you use a tool like Balsamiq to create digital wireframes. Team members always have feedback which can be easily done to these wireframes. If you did not create wireframes but made direct designs, making changes to this later would be a very very cumbersome process.

4) Coherent Development
Wireframes allow you to consider the software architecture of the app even before you get into the creatives. API optimization, memory management, caching can all be thought out after this phase to ensure optimal app performance. Getting sign off on these from the relevant stakeholders, before development, can really help simplify the development process and reduce the number of iterations.

5) Getting Buy-in of Stake holders
Sometimes it just good to wireframe different concepts out so that you can help present a case to your stakeholders. A picture is worth a thousand words. This might seem cliche but is definitely worth following when presenting a new ground breaking idea, a new product concept or simply an improved version of an existing concept.

Though wireframing is super critical at the start of creating an app, it is important to keep some room for small changes so that the creativity of the graphic designer is not restricted. Especially if the agile development model is being used, the iterations on wireframes might need to be done after the first round of features are in development.