The Virtues of Low-Fi

The Virtues of Low-fi Stephen Hay @ Catawiki UX Crawl • July 25, 2018

Hi! I’m Stephen.

Design/UX Deliverables

“The perfect is the enemy 
 of the good.” —Voltaire

Not the thing. Not the thing. The thing.

Design processes

Short low / long high Low-fi High-fi “I’ve been thinking about this for a whole hour, and I’ve got a great idea!”

Gradual low to high Low High Kinda high Kinda high Kinda high Kinda high Kinda high

Long low / short high Low-fi High-fi “I’m starting to understand the problem.”

The most important question: 
 What’s most important?

The design funnel https://changethis.com/manifesto/show/48.04.DesignFunnel Many designers start here. Define Di s c o v e r Generate Create Design Values & Goals Moods & Metaphors Ideas, Define a concept A Visual Language

Most of this
can be low-fi

Fantasy-fi Usually needs high fidelity Interaction Sensory 
 Experience Content & 
 structure “High” fidelity that 
 doesn’t offer much more than low fidelity, but requires High-fidelity effort. It’s the illusion of reality. Many “static” prototypes fall into this category. 
 High-fi wireframes also.

The virtues of low-fi

Iterations are 
 quick and cheap

Low-fi tooling is 
 minimal and flexible.

Low-fi answers 
 questions early. “Nice.
What about (x)?” “Oh, shit.”

Low-fi encourages quantitative ideation.

Low-fi encourages 
 “most important” thinking.
It’s a meeting between your brain and the problem , with few distractions from tooling and processes.

Things that can be low-fi: • Sketching • Storyboards • Diagrams • (Paper) prototypes (but be careful!) • Planning • etc. These are actually subsets of sketching

Sketching

Sketching is not art.

A simple sketching process for ideation…

Thumbnails

No detail As many as possible As quickly as possible variety

Roughs PHOTO: Mike Rohde. Visit his blog: http://rohdesign.com/weblog/

Only a few, max. Flesh out your best ideas Focus on more detail (but not too much) Annotate, Ask & Answer questions

Thumbnails -> selection -> Roughs -> selection -> Comp/Prototype

Exercise 1:
Sketch some thumbnails 
 for your project. 1. No detail; just capture ideas ! 2. Make as many as you can in 5 minutes. It’s a numbers game! 3. Don’t censor yourself; all ideas are relevant at this point.

Exercise 2:
Make some rough sketches. 1. Flesh out your best thumbnail ideas to see if they hold up. 2. More detail, but not too much !

Sketching is one of your most important skills.

It’s a translator between your brain and paper.
It’s a note-taking tool.
It’s a communication tool.
It’s a thinking tool.
It’s a filter.
It’s a wayfinder. It’s the lowest of low-fi. Do it always.

Thank you! @stephenhay