Toronto iOS, watchOS and tvOS Development | iPhone, Apple Watch, Apple TV Development company in Toronto, Canada

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wireframe prototype

Wireframing and prototyping play a major part in the mobile iOS app development process, enabling developers to craft apps that are better optimized and more powerful. Whether you want to develop an app or have already begun to do so, it is important to understand the benefits of wireframing and prototyping, and why carrying them out pays off. Neglecting them can have a major impact on the overall quality of your app.

Understanding Wireframes

Wireframes are like sketches that capture the visual functionality of your app, as well as the user flow. They are not the final blueprints of the app, but they do help developers overcome design problems, and encourages them to be creative. Usually, wireframes are made on paper and then taken to the drawing board by our creative team, who uses their combined expertise and experience in app development to create accurate wireframes.

Skipping wireframing would be the equivalent of a painter not sketching his subject, but proceeding to painting it directly, without carefully observing the shadows, the way the light falls on it, and all those small but important details that set masterpieces apart from other paintings. But low-fidelity wireframes, those made on paper or on the drawing board, are often not sufficient. iOS apps have become increasingly sophisticated, and even a single-purpose app can come with complex features and intricate user interactions which low-fidelity wireframes cannot render accurately. A mock-up app delivered as a PDF can give you an idea about the user flow, but only in a basic way.

Why High-Fidelity Wireframes are Important

For optimal iOS app development, you want to make sure your app gets built on reliable, precise wireframes. Mid-fidelity wireframes are created with the assistance of specialized iOS app wireframing software such as Axure or Balsamiq. These wireframes present the app textually as well as visually, emulating the user interface and navigation. Mid-fidelity wireframes come with their limitations, though. They leave out plenty of detail, and although they do recreate the essential elements of the app’s user interface, they don’t always capture its actual look and feel that well, nor do they reproduce interactions perfectly. That’s where high-fidelity wireframes come into play.

An essential component of top quality mobile iOS app development, high-fidelity wireframes are built with leading wireframing software such as Illustrator or Fireworks, which are handled by expert developers who know how to harness the power of these advanced tools to recreate the in-app user experience. For us, high-fidelity wireframes have always been the zenith of app wireframing, a vital step for ensuring that the mobile iOS apps we develop run smoothly and fluently and provide a wonderful user experience.

From Basic Wireframe to Prototype

High-fidelity wireframes can be a fine example of basic app prototyping as a way to identify hiccups in the app design and deal with them to improve the quality of the final product. If you think that wireframing and prototyping your iOS app will cost you a fortune, think again. Today we have HTML-CSS and JavaScript browser-based wireframing development tools such as Twitter Bootstrap and Zurbs Foundation. These powerful tools enable our mobile app development team to quickly create cost-effective prototypes of your app starting from low-fidelity wireframes and assess the app design, looking for ways to improve the user flow and responsiveness.

Our app developers are well versed in web-based wireframing and prototyping tools, which come with certain advantages over many software-based solutions. With them we can build a basic app layout mockup in a very short time – a matter of hours at most – and then have real people test it online to ensure it is as well-designed as you want it to be. Also important is that with such tools we can extensively test the responsiveness of an app in development, or its capability to display beautifully on screens of any size, so that it will work with all the major smartphone and tablet brands on the market.

We Can Prototype Your App

As you can see, wireframing and prototyping aren’t really optional components of an iOS mobile app development project, but key requirements for building a great app. We fully understand their importance and are committed to providing high-fidelity wireframing and prototyping services depending on your needs. Our app developers are more than comfortable with the latest wireframing technologies and would be more than happy to use their skills and talent to prototype your mobile iOS app in a way that guarantees the final release will stand out on the highly competitive iOS market.