Understanding wireframe testing in web design

Your website’s structure matters a lot—whether you’re designing your business’s first website, redesigning it as part of a large-scale rebranding initiative, or simply streamlining the structure so you can build more pages faster.

Many marketing teams prioritize logos, color schemes, messaging, and graphics when it’s time to design pages. While those elements are important, it’s a mistake to start your web design project there. Instead, every web design should begin with wireframes—the fundamental blueprints that give websites their shape, layout, and flow.

Use this guide to develop a deeper understanding of the role wireframes play in strong web design and why testing is such an integral part of the process. You’ll also learn what types of testing are available and how to create testing protocols that fit your project’s needs.

A wireframe is a rough sketch of your website’s layout, page by page. For example, your homepage wireframe will mark out the approximate size and placement of different features such as the menu bar, header, specific images (marked as a box with an X through it), and specific widgets like a calendar or map.

These wireframes act as blueprints, templates, or even initial brainstorming tools as you and your team decide what your website will look like.

Web designers and companies use wireframes to fulfill the following tasks:

• Getting feedback from user groups

• Organizing the page’s structural layout to ensure all the elements fit and make sense together

• Comparing options and experimenting with layout and size for different types of screen sizes—while many templates may have responsive design coding, which facilitates virtually all screen size ratios, it’s important to consider how typical desktop and mobile users will experience the website

• Making sure the most important elements of each page are prominently and intuitively positioned

• Working through the flow from page to page that users will experience in different use cases—not only should the organization be intuitive, but it’s important for users to go through search, purchase, and engagement cycles with as few clicks as possible

• Creating standardized templates that can be used for blogs, landing pages, franchise pages, and other repeated page types

What is a wireframe not?

It’s just as important to understand what a wireframe isn’t. A wireframe is not any of the following:

• A detailed design for putting together graphical elements, logos, and color palettes

• A high-fidelity visual for contemplating final design choices

• A commitment to a design flow or an entrenched design aesthetic

• A colorful rendering of the final construction with all the specific colors and features

• A detailed prototype that displays content or the specific function of different tools you may want on your website

Wireframes are more the general blueprint that establishes the technical or essential details without any flair. Make them as simple and bare-bones as possible so you can easily test out core elements and website flow. In fact, the rougher the sketch, the better, as this makes it cheaper and easier to ideate, test, and refine.

What’s the difference between wireframes and mockups?

In your web design project, you’ll use both wireframes and mockups (in that order).

Wireframes are relatively simple sketches of which elements go where. They create a quick visual layout of all the elements you want your website to have. Creating these before you develop detailed web pages makes it cost-effective and simple to make changes.

Mockups happen later. These are higher-fidelity visual assets that layer much more detail on top of the wireframe structure—the font, icons, graphics, button formats, and color options. If a wireframe is the outlined drawing, mockups are the fully colored illustrations.

Wireframes are typically the domain of UI teams because they focus on how users will interact with the website and brand. Meanwhile, both UI teams and visual design teams will approve the mockups before development continues.

There are several different types of wireframe testing options you can choose from. Here are some of the most popular:

The wait and review

With this type, you can create your wireframes straight away, whether you use an AI wireframe generator, a virtual whiteboard, or even a pen and paper. Set them aside and come back the next day to review the pages and start making changes with a fresh eye.

Five-second test

The average attention span only lasts 8.25 seconds. When users aren’t focused or engaged, it could be half as long.

Take this into consideration. Flash your wireframe to a test audience for just five seconds and ask them to jot down their first impression, the main elements they recall, and their thoughts about the intended audience.

Keep refining the wireframe until your audience decides to engage.

First-click test

Web layouts need to make intuitive sense. Test the strength of your wireframes by seeing if the clickable elements will lead where users expect.

This process uses interactive wireframes (also called clickable wireframes), which introduce some functionality without fully becoming prototypes. You can ask test subjects how they think they would navigate to specific destinations or to walk through how they think a sales process would go. If there’s any frustration or confusion, rework those elements.

Comparing options

Wireframes are easy to make, and your team can create dozens or even hundreds.

During the ideation phase, don’t put a cap on ideas. Instead, allow everyone to flesh out their ideas and then compare the different pages to see which ones you like best.

This test method often works best together with others, as you can pick your favorites and then run them through more quantitative tests.

Hotspot testing and analytics

Depending on your testing budget, you can prototype multiple competing wireframes and have pools of users interact with them.

Analyze the resulting data surrounding what elements received the most engagement, visit duration time, signs of positivity, and other measurable cues that indicate which layouts your target market likes best.

Follow these steps to prepare for wireframe testing:

Step 1: Identify your target audience

Which users are the target market of a specific page or set of pages? Determine the following:

• Their likely intent

• Their current behavior

• Where they are in the sales process

• Their cultural and technological understanding of website navigation norms.

This information will help you create wireframes that take these factors into consideration.

Step 2: Set clear objectives and goals

Specify the company’s needs. What is the specific goal of the page or set of pages?

For example, do you want to clearly differentiate dozens of franchise locations? Do you want to drive readers to make a purchase or join a mailing list?

Keep this purpose in mind as you make every decision.

Step 3: Create a wireframe prototype

Armed with knowledge of the target market’s background and what you want them to do on each page, start creating the wireframes. Have clear buttons, set the most important widgets and tools near the top of the page, and make sure visitors have a clear takeaway from the page within just a few seconds.

At this point, the wireframe won’t necessarily be ideal. It might not even pass the test. But it’s important to have a rough or even experimental wireframe so you can see what works and what doesn’t.

Step 4: Define scenarios and tasks

Consider which tests are the most important for your project. For informational pages, you might start with the five-second test to gauge basic layout and text or graphic layout.

For each test, set a very specific and discrete goal. This minimizes the risk of cloudy results, which can misguide your team and lead to overcorrections or bad revisions.

Step 5: Recruit participants

Find participants who can give you clear data and feedback. Here are some options:

• Internal teams: these people can help with first-pass testing and assessments. However, their familiarity with your organization means you can’t use employees and staff alone.

• Customers: you can incentivize customers and target market members to participate by inviting them to join test groups, offering discounts or unique opportunities, and giving rewards points. Be sure to emphasize that you’re looking for honest feedback, not a specific answer or reaction.

• Potential customers: consider reaching out to recruitment agencies or outline customer panels to find people who represent your user personas. Invite a representative sample to test your wireframes.

• Community members: if your brand has a strong community following, you may find eager volunteers who are willing to help. However, keep in mind that audiences familiar with your mission won’t be able to give the same perspective as general audiences. 

Step 6: Choose the right environment

For in-person test exercises, create a quiet environment where testers can focus on the wireframes with minimal distraction.

If you’re conducting virtual tests, run analytics software in the background that can track the decision-making time, create heat maps, and aggregate feedback.

Step 7: Train moderators and observers

Depending on the nature of the test, you’ll need moderators and instructors. Give them clear guidance on how to introduce users to the test and how to make sure the environment provides the clearest possible results.

Step 8: Pilot testing

Have a test run where you can prepare the moderators and make sure the test measures what you actually need it to.

You have two options for this:

1. Run an internal pilot test before leaning on external volunteers.

2. Do a smaller test before a more formal large-scale test.

Step 9: Prepare for data collection and analysis

Finally, decide how you’ll collect insights. Identify the criteria and data you want to gather, and research the different wireframe test tools you want to use. Also, identify team members who can join the test by observing and notetaking or others who can interpret the data and translate it into actionable changes.

With your preparations complete, it’s time to conduct the test itself. Work through all four of these steps for every test you conduct.

Step 1: Design your wireframe

Design—or for latter-stage tests, redesign—your wireframe. Make sure it aligns with your audience’s needs and cultural background.

Step 2: Plan and choose your user testing methodologies

Set up all of your testing resources and protocols by following the nine steps outlined above.

Step 3: Set up your usability testing session

Implementing the test session will involve the following actions:

• Setting up a specific time and date for participants—important for both virtual and in-person or paper-based testing

• Running the testing software or analytics tools in the background

• Recording results

• Asking participants for general feedback and suggestions

• Aggregating the data and preparing for in-depth analysis

Step 4: Iterate from your findings

This step is at the heart of the wireframe testing process. Your results will identify what works, any usability issues, and any areas that need further revisions.

Take the following steps during this phase:

1. Flag all usability issues that haven’t been covered. Use this first-pass period to uncover all issues and sort them into an easy format for review and rework.

2. Rank the issues and identify the core causes. Whenever the underlying usability issue is clear, such as messy navigation or bad linking infrastructure, note down the cause so wireframe designers can address it later. Then, rank the issues that haven’t been addressed in terms of both frequency (how often the problem occurs per user or per interaction) and significance (violating accessibility guidelines or preventing successful sales interactions would be ranked highly, for example).

3. Create a priority list. Identify the issues with the biggest impact and prioritize fixing them. While good wireframe designs will resolve all of these issues, addressing the major issues through a wireframe redesign and then re-testing it is generally better than trying to fix everything at once.

4. Revise. Revise the tested wireframe to address priority issues. Make changes for any downstream impacts.

5. Conduct tests and repeat. Continue to make iterative changes and verify the value of the changes through additional testing sequences.

6. Document along the way. We recommend creating clear records of tests, results, changes, and additional insights. This documentation can inform future projects and provide context for any project reviews your organization conducts.

Having a clear, repeatable, and methodical process for all your wireframe tests will make your results more objectively trustworthy. It can also enable you to gain invaluable insights from the start.

Strengthen your wireframe testing processes with these best practices:

• Always create real-world test scenarios. The tests should focus on how users are most likely to engage with your website, not just how ideal users behave.

• Eliminate bias. Try to find a wide range of participants and minimize reliance on internal testers. You should also ensure that moderators are well-trained so they can conduct the tests effectively.

• Outline how test results will inform revisions. Create clear guidelines for how data teams and UI teams will collaborate to review test results, derive the right insights, and use them to make iterative changes. Using clear documentation and collaborative notes tools so that designers can link to feedback or data as the impetus for every revision. 

Wireframe testing is a critical tool for great web design, and it’s almost as important as the wireframes themselves.

Use testing early and often throughout your web design and redesign projects. It will enable you to use real user feedback to shape layout and structural design decisions in a way that serves your audience and organization best.