We were very much delighted to read user experience designer Kevin Tully‘s review of Wirify on G2 Crowd. It is reprinted below with the author’s permission – thank you Kevin!
When I was first learning UX, this little tool was extremely useful. Despite how well-trained your eyes may be, there is still something about reducing a website down to its very basic layout and shape that is very helpful. When you discover a website you intuitively like, you can quickly see what comprises it — and vice versa. This tool isn’t going to magically feed you answers to web design problems, but what it did for me is it helped me to start understanding what makes a truly “simple” or “clean” design at a base level.
The tool is so insanely easy to install and use that I can see absolutely no reason why all UX Designers should not just have it in their bookmarks bar. It can be a bit buggy or haphazard in its rendering, but I’d say 85% of the time it works the way it should.
This is a great tool to help VERY quickly teach other people what a wireframe is — whether they be budding UX designers or VPs or your grandparents.
Unlike many apps, Wirify’s utility to UX Designers is quick and obvious and it’s really the only tool that does what it does. Click a button and see what it does (and how its useful) nearly instantaneously. That’s a semi-rare thing when it comes to professional tools like this!
The components Wirify breaks webpages down into are, at times, too simple. It would be nice if it somehow knew what kind of controls were on the page and displayed more “stencil-like” wireframe graphics, rather than purely grey squares and rectangles.
Totally a pipe dream, but I wish it could be applied to more than just websites. It’s such a useful tool I would love to use it on UIs across mediums and devices.
I’ve definitely seen multiple webpages that Wirify was unable to render properly or fully. Because of the way the tool can really be applied to any webpage (its greatest asset) I suppose this is to be expected, but it can sometimes be a bummer.
Truthfully, I don’t see any reason you should sign up for the “Pro Version” except that it helps to support a good product.
Figuring out the basic skeletal structure of a page — whether it be someone else’s or your own — in order to understand why it feels cluttered, or why it feels clean.
Wireframing
- Get it and use it because there is virtually no reason why you shouldn’t.
- Realize that a wireframe should probably NOT just consist of grey squares and rectangles, and that this tool should be used merely to approximate the structure of a page.
- Use common sense if/when it glitches out. If there’s a random grey square floating on the left border of the page that isn’t there when you turn Wirify off, it’s a bug.
Cut through the noise and see the skeleton of the web