Back in the early 2000s, the UK government launched a large-scale healthcare software system: the NHS National Programme for IT. The projected cost of the development was initially £6.2 billion, but poor design planning eventually inflated it to around £12 billion.

The worst part? The project was eventually abandoned. That £6 billion problem could have been avoided if they had started with a wireframe.

Dramatics aside, building a wireframe for your mobile app is one of the easiest ways to avoid costly redesigns and ensure that you’re creating a great experience for your users. Here’s everything you need to know about wireframing, including a step-by-step guide on how you can start creating a mobile app wireframe in just a few steps.

What is wireframing?

Wireframing is the process of visualizing an app’s user interface and interaction design through basic shapes and laying the structural foundation before detailing visual designs. Think of it this way: you wouldn’t build a skyscraper without a blueprint, right? The same rule applies to app development, hence wireframing. 

You’ll use two key types of wireframes at various points in development: low- and high-fidelity.

• Low-fidelity wireframes use simple boxes or lines to indicate content areas and breaks. These barebone structures focus feedback on information architecture and task completion flow without visual distractions.
• High-fidelity wireframes incorporate imagery, copy, colors, and branding to approximate final designs. These later-stage mocks represent the complete user experience for testing.

How to make mobile app wireframes in 7 steps

Every successful mobile app starts with a solid wireframe. In just seven steps, we’ll walk you through how to create a wireframe that not only organizes your content but also enhances its usability and provides a seamless user experience. 

But before we dive into the design process, it’s crucial to establish a strong foundation by researching, setting clear goals, and analyzing your competition to ensure your app aligns with user needs and market demands.

1. Conduct market research and perform a competitive analysis

The first step in designing a successful mobile app is to clearly define your goals and understand your competitive landscape. It sounds simple in theory, but like all parts of the design process, it’s easier said than done.

First, you’ll want to identify the core purpose and value proposition of your app. Ask yourself what user needs will this app meet? What problems is it uniquely positioned to solve better than alternatives? A simple way to go about this is to apply the jobs-to-be-done framework to your design, including:

• Functional jobs: What practical tasks are users trying to accomplish?
• Emotional jobs: What emotional or psychological needs do users have (like feeling secure, confident, or innovative)?
• Social jobs: How does the job relate to their social standing or influence?

For example, if you’re building a personal budgeting app, you might assign your app the following jobs:

• Tracking the user's income and expenses (functional job)
• Helping users feel secure and in control of their finances (emotional job)
• Allowing users to share their financial progress with friends and family (social job)

From here, you can conduct competitive research by studying other apps in your category. Analyze their interfaces, functionality, designs, and user feedback. Compare their strengths and weaknesses to identify opportunities to differentiate your app. 

Most importantly, resist the temptation to skip this step. Not only is this stage crucial for uncovering your user’s biggest pain points and jobs-to-be-done, but it will also inform your design and development process later on.

2. Sketch your layout and target user flow

Now that you’ve mapped out the key problems your app will solve, we can jump into the actual design process, starting with the wireframing stage. This is where you’ll sketch out your app’s basic wireframe design and high-level user flow. 

Start by mapping your app’s functionality and key screens—these could include your home, features, and customer support pages. Then, draft a flowchart to visualize how these screens will connect to one another and prioritize the critical tasks and jobs-to-be-done you identified earlier.

3. Create a low-fidelity wireframe

With your user flow mapped, it’s time to start drafting an initial low-fidelity wireframe. This means visually designing basic wireframe templates that focus purely on your app’s layout, functionality, and user flow. For example, you might choose to use simple boxes and lines to indicate generic UI elements like menus, buttons, text fields, and headlines.

Here’s an example of what one of these wireframes looks like inside Balsamiq, a dedicated low-fidelity wireframing tool:

The goal of these low-fidelity designs is to mock up how your core features and app screens will be structured when you’re designing your app prototype. You can always iterate on your app’s design later on.

4. Refine your layout by adding design elements and placeholder copy

Once your initial user flows and low-fidelity wireframes are complete, the next stage is all about refining your app and greasing any squeaky wheels in its layout. This might include gradually building out your app’s visual design, including typography, color scheme, branding, and core visual components. 

To streamline this process, you can use Creatie’s image enhancer and design mockup generator to refine your app’s layout and visual elements quickly. These tools ensure that you have a consistent design language across your app and seamlessly integrate any placeholder text or initial content.

5. Test your user flows

Once you’ve put your wireframes through their initial design phases, the next step is to test the user flows you’ve defined. Do users easily move through your app, following the journeys you outlined, or are they barely making their way through before bouncing?

The best way to figure this out is to conduct targeted user interviews and ask very specific open-ended questions to uncover friction points in your app’s design. Since you likely have limited data at this stage, you’ll also want to avoid relying solely on aggregated heat maps.

6. Test, gather feedback, and iterate

Once you have your wireframe ready, you’ll want to conduct thorough user testing, followed by a review with your internal team and any relevant stakeholders:

• User testing and feedback: Recruit both existing and potential users across your main target demographics. Have them complete common tasks in the app wireframe to see where they struggle.
• Team collaboration and review: In addition to your end-users, get regular input from team members involved in the product design process. Have them review the wireframe to identify issues.

Following each round of testing, analyze user feedback, identify pain points, and make the necessary tweaks to enhance the user experience. But remember, no wireframe version should be treated as finished. Even after you’ve deployed the final version of your app, it’s important to continually iterate on your designs and ensure that its user experience is seamless.

7. Build out reusable components and design systems

As your app takes shape, you’ll want to start thinking ahead and begin architecting design components and design systems that can be reused in other app designs and new pages. What’s even better is that you can create a design library that centralizes your key design components like buttons, icons, form elements, accordions, and banners. 

Then, once you have your assets in one place, you should begin building an accompanying style guide that clearly defines your app’s color palettes, typographic scales, grid structures, and responsive behaviors.

This isn’t easy, of course, but with AI-powered tools like Creatie’s automatic style guide generator, you can build out a complete team style guide and asset library in just a few clicks.

Choosing the best wireframe tools

Understanding how wireframes work and why they’re important is one thing, but trying to find the right wireframing tool for your design project is another task entirely. 

Of course, the tools you use will largely depend on your exact needs and use case. If you’re looking for high quality, these are the top three wireframing solutions we’d recommend:

Creatie

Creatie empowers UI and UX designers using AI. At a high level, our wireframing tool uses AI to generate customizable design elements and templates, saving you precious time on initial ideation and creation. Yes, this includes wireframes. For UI designers, Creatie makes generating new interfaces simple. And UX designers can also quickly validate their concepts by collaborating with the rest of their team, such as product managers and developers, in real time.

Sketch

Sketch reigns as an industry standard for mobile app wireframing. Loved for its intuitive vector-based editing tools, Sketch enables UI/UX designers to draft anything from low-fidelity structures to high-fidelity, interactive prototypes. Plus, it has built-in libraries and plug-ins that help designers expand the platform’s native functionality and build their wireframes faster.

That being said, it’s worth noting that Sketch is an exclusive macOS app that is only available to Mac users. Its design files are also stored locally on your computer, which can lead to version management challenges. This means you’ll likely need additional cloud services (like Dropbox) to share your design and wireframe files.

Figma

Now for the tool that’s almost synonymous with the design industry: Figma. This tool is one of the most popular wireframing solutions on the market thanks to its browser-based functionality, vast integrations library, prototyping tools, and smooth developer handoff capabilities. However, it also has the price tag to match and can quickly drain your budget if you plan on adopting it across an organization.

The other main tradeoff with Figma is the steeper learning curve. Figma’s breadth of capabilities requires designers to spend time learning the ins and outs of its features and functionality. But if you have the time and budget to spare, Figma is likely the all-around pick for general wireframing and design.

How designers are using AI to build wireframes

You’re probably wondering how AI design tools factor into the wireframing process. From automated layout generation to predictive prototyping, AI tools are helping designers focus more on creativity and less on repetitive wireframing tasks that can quickly eat into your workday. 

At Creatie, we’ve incorporated many of these AI design use cases into our own platform, but here are some ways you can leverage AI to focus on wireframing specifically:

AI-driven wireframe generation

Traditionally, wireframing required manual work, with designers sketching layouts and refining them through numerous iterations. However, AI tools now make it possible to automate much of this process. 

For example, with Creatie, you can enter a basic prompt and let AI suggest and generate a complete wireframe mockup for your mobile app, which saves you countless hours on brainstorming and drawing layouts from scratch. Not only does this accelerate your design workflow, but it also gives you more time to ideate and focus on other critical areas of product design.

Predictive user behavior

Another standout feature of modern AI tools is their ability to predict users’ behavior, allowing you and your design teams to create more intuitive and usable interfaces from the outset. 

A perfect example of this is attention insight, an AI analytics tool that uses machine learning to show how consumers will engage with your designs before launch. This level of predictive prototyping can help you fine-tune your app’s usability before building more interactive prototypes later in the design process.

Create your first mobile app wireframe with Creatie

You don’t need to spend countless hours outlining a mobile app wireframe that goes through seemingly endless rounds of revisions and stakeholder reviews. With Creatie, you can generate your first wireframe with a basic prompt, make tweaks, and collaborate in real time with the rest of your team.

Get started for free and build your first mobile wireframe today with Creatie.