13 min read

Mastering High-Fidelity Wireframes: A Guide To Creating Professional Prototypes

Suren Karapetyan

on Sep 17, 2024

QUICK SUMMARY

Don't wait until launch to find out what users think of your product. High fidelity wireframes let you use real user feedback to perfect your product design before you build.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Why Use High-Fidelity Wireframes? Tools and Software Best Practices Advanced Techniques

"Wireframing" products to gather feedback before investing in a full-on build is a much older practice than most of us realize. Even in medieval times, engineers (if they were called that back then) would make prototype versions of tools and items and showcase them to their lords before starting mass production.

The modern software world has naturally adopted this process, too. However, unlike building a prototype version of a product, modern wireframing and prototyping tools allow us to test the prototype at an even earlier phase—while it's still in the process of being designed.

Today's focus is the most important part of building software prototypes—the high-fidelity wireframe that enables interactivity and brings a concept to life.

Understanding High-Fidelity Wireframes

Before explaining what high-fidelity wireframes are, let me first touch upon the concept of wireframe fidelity itself.

Fidelity refers to the amount of detail that you include in a wireframe. It can be visual details such as the colors of UI components that represent your branding or images that are supposed to be on that screen (e.g., product photos in an e-commerce site search results).

Apart from visual aspects, there is also content fidelity. This is when you’re either using placeholder text/content (e.g. lorem ipsum) or real content (product names and descriptions).

Depending on the fidelity of your wireframe, you will either use grayscale visual elements with generic looks and placeholder content (low fidelity) or a branded color scheme with elements from your design system along with actual content (high-fidelity).

Here’s what they look like side-by-side.

fidelity mockups high fidelity wireframes — *Low-fidelity (left) vs. high-fidelity (right).*

Although you might think that high-fidelity wireframes are the obvious choice when comparing these two, this is not always the case. The beauty of low-fidelity mockups is in the speed at which you can design, user test, and iterate on them.

So, in the very early phases of your design, you would usually have a couple of iterations with a low-fidelity wireframe before moving on to creating a high-fidelity one.

Benefits of High-Fidelity Wireframes

High-fidelity wireframes, while being more time-consuming to make, are a very valuable part of your design project as they come with a wide range of benefits. Here are a couple of them:

Better communication: Humans are visual creatures and understand the design better if you use the proper colors, elements, and content. So, the chances are high that the same person will greenlight your low-fidelity wireframe but find issues and provide you with feedback when they see the high-fidelity one for the first time.
Better usability testing: You will improve the quality of feedback you get from your users when you show the real content as it will appear in the final design. A search results page looks like a list of gray boxes in the low-fidelity wireframe. You can’t say if the elements on that page are easy to scan until you see real images and text written on it.
Prototyping: Clickable prototypes are horrible when built on lo-fi wireframes. High-fidelity prototypes, however, look very close to the final design and are good enough for you to share with your early-stage users.
Engineering-design team communication: You can share your hi-fi wireframes with your development team to get early feedback from them, too, in terms of implementation challenges and concerns. They have the necessary level of detail to let developers understand how they will build it and what kind of problems they can potentially face.

Finally, hi-fi wireframes can show the end look and feel of your product to you and your designer colleagues, letting you find design inconsistencies or other visual issues that you need to fix before taking your user interface for another test ride.

Tools and Software for High-Fidelity Wireframing

While you can technically do low-fidelity wireframes on a piece of paper or a whiteboard, you have no choice but to pick a specialized product design tool for making a high-fidelity one.

So, let’s review a couple of popular candidates for you to choose from and understand their capabilities.

Figma

Figma is the market leader in digital product design, with over 40% of all user experience designers picking it for prototyping, user flow, and wireframe designs.

Platform: Web, Desktop (MacOS, Windows)

Where it shines: real-time collaboration among designers, managers, and developers, as well as support for multiple platforms.

figma features high fidelity wireframes — *Credit:* *Figma.com*

In terms of features, here’s what I would like to highlight about Figma:

Collaboration: Figma allows multiple team members to work on the same file simultaneously. You can see the cursors of everyone browsing or editing the design file, leaving comments, as well as chat in real-time with a small message box opening up beside your cursor.

Design System & Component Support: You can create reusable components in Figma (including multiple states for them) as well as define an entire design system using your guidelines and components.

Prototyping: You can convert your designs into clickable prototypes that users can browse to understand what your product would feel like. Although not the most advanced system for prototyping out there, it’s still quite capable.

Sketch

Sketch used to be the go-to design tool before the emergence of Figma. Some speculate that it’s Mac-exclusivity was among the reasons this otherwise-great tool lost its crown.

Platforms: macOS

Where it shines: Sketch is highly customizable thanks to its extensive plugin support, making it a great choice for niche design needs.

sketch features high fidelity wireframes — *Sketch interface.*

Now, let’s look at the most prominent features of Sketch.

Vector Editing: Compared to the rest, Sketch arguably has the most robust vector-editing tool on the market, including boolean and match operator support for defining your shapes.

Web Preview: While not a full editor, Sketch does have a web app for reviewing designs, handing off assets to developers, and testing prototypes.

Prototyping: Sketch’s prototyping capabilities are on par with Figma. Here, you can also connect your artboads through a flow, make elements clickable, and more.

Adobe XD

This is creative software giant Adobe’s response to the fierce competition in the wireframe and UI/UX design market.

Platforms: macOS, Windows

Where it shines: Adobe XD is fully integrated into their creative cloud, letting you seamlessly import designs and assets from other Adobe tools and more.

adobe xd features high fidelity wireframes — *Credit:* *Adobe*

Having played around with the capabilities of this tool, here’s what else is worth mentioning:

Prototyping: AdobeXD stands out in its ability to prototype micro-interactions, apart from the standard prototyping suite.

Animations: Being part of the company that created After Effects, it’s not surprising that AdobeXD has more advanced UI element animation capabilities.

Collaboration: While not as advanced as Figma, AdobeXD allows several people to edit the design simultaneously.

Axure RP

While the rest were general UI/UX design tools that also did wireframes and prototypes, this one is specifically focused on the latter.

Platforms: macOS, Windows

Where it shines: Being a specialized tool, Axure RP can advance prototyping with complex interactions and user journeys.

axure rp high fidelity wireframes — *Credit:* *Axure*

Now, let’s take a look at the functionality that this tool includes:

Advanced Logic: Instead of simple “click to open next artboard,” Axure RP can add complex logic into prototypes. That means that you can open menus and select items, and the design and content will transform dynamically based on your selection or other similar actions.

Handover Documentation: While nearly all products mentioned here have developer handover, Axure RP is the one option in which you can create highly detailed documentation that describes your design and logic.

Flow Diagrams: Apart from designing the high-fidelity wireframe, you can also use Axure RP to create flow diagrams that describe the user journey and the business logic behind your design.

To sum up, there is no clear winner in the “best high-fidelity wireframing tool.” The tools listed here, as well as the ones in our curated roundup of UX design tools, come with both strengths and weaknesses. So it’s really a matter of preference depending on which aspects are the most important ones for you and your team.

Best Practices for Creating High-Fidelity Wireframes

When you have finally reached the point in your design process when it is time for to develop this type of wireframe, make sure to follow these tips to get the most value out of your hi-fi mockup.

Wireframing Process Best Practices

Make sure your user persona is up-to-date. You will already have a version of a persona that you used to create your first lo-fi design. This persona, however, will most likely be outdated as you have already had a couple of testing iterations with them and discovered many new aspects of their personality and needs.
Review all of the previous user feedback before starting the high-fidelity wireframe. The chances are that there was the feedback you got from users reviewing the lo-fi version that you considered irrelevant at that point but will become highly relevant now.
There is no such thing as the "final version" of a wireframe. Don’t overthink the little details. Instead of working on the detailed wireframe for weeks, make a couple of changes and take it for a spin. The shorter the cycle of your team adding design ideas and the user testing them, the quicker you will reach the point when your wireframe is ready to become a final design.
Take advantage of your design system’s components and templates. There's no award for starting from scratch! Using these templates saves a lot of time, and the result will look as close to the final design as possible.

Wireframe Design Tips

In addition to the advice above on running the design process effectively, here are some tips related to the design itself.

Keep your design consistent. Although it’s still a wireframe and not the final design, I still suggest you keep everything consistent, including colors, typography, and whitespace. This way, you will make sure that the people testing your design are not experiencing unnecessary usability issues and providing you with biased learnings.
Keep the visual hierarchy. Technically, it should be already present in the lo-fi version too. But if not, please add it here. You can then use high-fidelity wireframes of yours to test the effectiveness of your visual hierarchy.
Add accessibility elements to your design. Hi-fi wireframes are also a great tool for testing the accessibility of your design. So make sure to set the right contrast rates for different elements overlapping each other and keep in mind other accessibility aspects too.

Finally, don’t forget to give visual aids to users testing the design. This is especially relevant when you’re testing only a part of your product’s design and there are screens or steps missing. To avoid confusing your users, make sure to show notes that explain where in the journey they are at that moment and what they are supposed to do.

Advanced Techniques for High-Fidelity Wireframing

The best practices described above will let you get a “good enough” version of your hi-fi wireframe. But, if you want to make something amazing, then consider using these advanced techniques.

Interactive Wireframes

Some popular wireframing tools come with prototyping features built in. So, why not take advantage of it and make your wireframe come alive? You can make your UI elements clickable and let users travel from one screen to another—mimicking the journey they will have on the real app. I suggest you add animated transitions that will make the change in the page or screen more apparent to your users.

You can also add animations and transitions to different elements in your mobile app or web design and see if it helps your users notice a certain element on the screen or interact with it the way you intended.

Visual Design Elements

To help your hi-fi wireframe properly represent your product and brand, you can also consider incorporating the following if:

Typography: The fonts, spacing, and text colors in your design guidelines.
Branding: Your logo, brand colors, and visual assets representing your brand.
Real content: Instead of writing lorem ipsum where a product description should be in your eCommerce app design, write an actual product description.
Real visual assets: If there are any illustrations or images that you were planning to have on your screens, add them too.
Gradients and shadows: These will make your wireframe look more realistic and help you add a layer of visual hierarchy or interactions.

Note: With respect to highlighting interactions with shadows, Google’s material design is the best. It uses shadows to show elevation and tell the user if an element is hovered, clicked, or idle.

highlighting interactions with shadows high fidelity wireframes

Tips for Team Collaboration

Both prototyping and wireframing are never jobs for a single person. You are either building it with your design team, brainstorming with your product manager, or discussing it with your stakeholders.

So, I would suggest you do the following to facilitate the collaboration and development process on your designs:

Set up regular brainstorming sessions. Invite your product manager and fellow designers. Maybe an engineer too, as they will help you pick the most technically sound design. The keyword here is regular, it can be once a week, 2 weeks, or less often. But it’s important to always conduct these meetings as they help you come up with interesting solutions to your design problems.
Hold regular design reviews. If you work in a team, send your design for a cross-review and let several fresh pairs of eyes look at it and find problems that you might have missed. This process significantly increases the quality of your design and helps you make it consistent.
Document your thoughts and comments. Add annotations and comments on design that explain certain design decisions of yours or provide your colleagues with context.

Finally, ensure that whatever you build aligns with the company’s strategy and product vision. So, consult with your product team and leadership about this.

Test your design like it's the real deal.

Probably the single most important benefit of using high-fidelity wireframes is their ability to present the product as close to the final version as possible. This way, your users can test the visual representation of your product without you having to build the real one.

So, I highly encourage you to adopt the wireframing process and use it for testing your design and hypotheses in your design workflow. I hope that I have provided enough context and useful tips for you to make the most out of it.

If you want to dig deep into this topic, however, I suggest you read the complete guide to wireframing. Apart from that, you can also subscribe to our newsletter for more product management resources and guides.