Wireframe

A bare-bones visual sketch of a screen or flow, showing layout and structure without colors, styling, or real content. The blueprint before the design.

Why it matters

Wireframes let you agree on structure and flow cheaply, before anyone spends time on polish. Debating a wireframe is far cheaper than reworking a finished design or, worse, shipped code.

For example

Before design, the team sketches a grey-box wireframe of the dashboard to agree on layout, so no one wastes time polishing the wrong structure.

Go deeper

Figma Wireframe Tool (free online wireframing) Figma · article A rough wireframe answers a question words rarely settle: what the screen and the flow actually look like. Figma's free tier lets a non-technical founder drag boxes into screens and link them into a flow, which a developer can read in seconds instead of decoding paragraphs of description. You do not need design skills to sketch "login, then dashboard, then this button opens that", and that alone removes a lot of back and forth. Open figma.com →

Related terms

Also in Starting Up

See how founders actually handle this on Building the product, part of the Starting Up hub.

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