Evolution of Wireframe Software
Wireframe software has gone a long way towards becoming the applications that web-developers and web-designers are using today. I recently encountered an article written by Julie Stanford in the beginning of 2003 on Boxes and Arrows on the benefits of using HTML for wireframing, and I wondered how the evolution of wireframe software happened.
Naturally, the first known wireframe tool was pen and paper. This one existed since the beginning of web-development. By the way, the first website to ever be published is said to have been developed at a CERN facility in Switzerland in 1991. Pen and paper were surely used then, and it still is a handy wireframing tool because it is quick and available to anyone. Have some ideas and no computer at hand? Just pick up a pen and jot them down. But paper prototyping, of course, also has its limitations as a wireframing tool that are partly solved by more modern wireframe software.
The beginning of 2000 knew two main types of wireframe software, which Julie Stanford describes in her article. Those were HTML-based and graphical tools. HTML wireframe software allowed web-developers to put together a few lines of code, and get a very simplified version of the website, which, nevertheless, would allow users to see its functionality because it produced web-pages with working links between them. Apart from links, these pages would not have very much in common with the future website.
Graphical wireframe software would have a closer visual resemblance with the future website’s layout, but those wireframing tools had no capacity to show how the website would interact with the user. Interactive elements like, for instance, a drop-down menu, could only be represented by a still image. In many cases, Photoshop or similar image-processing applications were used.
Today, thankfully, there is a lot more diversity than this. One of the first specialized wireframe software applications was released in 2003 and a variety of other tools followed, becoming more and more progressive every year. The latest wireframe software, first desktop and later web-based, is meant specifically for creating website wireframes with the least effort and time involved and allows web-developers not only to design great user interfaces but also to test those user interface prototypes through usability tests.
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