One small change to the UI can take hours of extra time to update in a prototype. Prototyping involves designing multiple screens, interactions, even animations, that all get linked together. You can accumulate technical debt by skipping over the mockup phase and jumping from wireframes into interactive prototypes. Website mockups allow you to iterate and gather feedback on your design without creating a ton of technical debt, defined by Outsystems as being “a debt that businesses eventually have to pay with time, money, and resources, typically for choosing speed over quality.”Īnd technical debt isn’t just related to code. They help answer vital user experience questions such as “can my users actually use my site?” And “do they perform tasks and objectives with ease and satisfaction or difficulty and frustration?” They are high-quality interactive representations of your site design that allow for user testing and feedback. Prototypes demonstrate the functionality and usability of your site.

Because mockups provide a near-final representation of how the site will look, this is a good stage to get stakeholder buy-in, without accumulating technical debt (we will get into that in a bit). They combine the structure of the wireframe with graphics, typography, UI design elements, and branding. Mockups are mid to high-fidelity visual representations of your website.Wireframing tools allow you to make revisions early in the design process before graphic design elements are added. They are low-fidelity representations of the content, structure, and information hierarchy. Wireframes are the blueprints of your web page.While there can be variations to each phase (like high-fidelity wireframes or low-fidelity prototypes), they generally flow in this order. The process of designing new website interfaces can be broken into three phases: wireframes, mockups, and prototypes. What are website mockups and what role do they play in web design? They communicate brand identity, define visual hierarchy, and allow you to get stakeholder buy-in - all before spending time prototyping or, even worse, starting to code.īut before we dive into the world of mockups, we first need to understand what they are, and what they aren’t.

Wireframe vs mockup for website