A presentation at Amsterdam UX Crawl @ Catawiki in in Amsterdam, Netherlands by Stephen Hay
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
With all our fancy tools, many are eager to jump into higher fidelity comps. This talk and mini-workshop on sketching was about staying low-fi for as long as possible in the design process, and treating design deliverables as process rather than product.
for free. You
can too.