Wireframes are typically skeletal, grayscale block diagrams that illustrate either

• layouts for individual Web pages or screens—showing the placement of headers and footers, branding, navigation schemes, content elements, images, advertisements, controls, and other elements
• layouts for windows in application programs
• workflows—depicting their essential components and your product’s overall structure

Labeling and annotations identify the specific elements within a diagram.

For a Web project, Team Spirit creates a wireframe for each unique Web page template for your site—for example, your home page, index pages for subsites or subsections, content pages, tabular pages, form pages, dialog pages, catalog pages, site maps, help pages, message pages, and error pages. To add interactivity to our wireframes, Team Spirit adds links and HTML form elements, as appropriate. Interactive wireframes are medium-fidelity prototypes, which Team Spirit uses for usability testing during our early Design Phase.

Because wireframes are devoid of strong visual elements, they allow your product team and participants in usability tests to focus on issues regarding page structure, interactions, navigation, and labeling rather than on a page’s visual design.