All good ideas start *somewhere*. Oh, that all “good” websites start out as perfectly crafted mockups. The reality is your favorite website likely started as a sketch on a whiteboard—a shell of the glory it would eventually have. To miss this point is to not only underestimate the distance an idea needs to travel, but to potentially underappreciate the cruder phases of web design.
Even still, there’s an understandable resistance for our clients and partners to join the lo-fi party:
“I Need to See It”
We can’t argue that the higher the fidelity, the easier it is to visualize what something might become. However, working in hi-fi too early tends to rob our team of opportunities to evaluate multiple ideas and gather useful, relevant input with you and your team.
Let’s say we just finished a brief Discovery and you’d like us to put together page mockups. Our hesitation in jumping to such a high-fidelity format is that we’ve yet to have any reasonable ideation with the project team. Admittedly, the odds of our stepping up to the plate and hitting home runs in style, layout, and content are fairly slim. Instead, we’d rather talk about these facets in lower fidelity, where our ability to course-correct is quicker and easier than adjusting mockups.
Even in print, SU found a lo-fi version of their Admissions Package helpful in imagining the possibilities.
On the other side of the coin, we understand the limitations of looking at gray boxes. That’s why we attempt to complement the gray-box, layout-focused discussions with visually explorative, style-focused discussions. These two tracks work in concert—often more efficiently than mockups—to help everyone on the team “see” where the site is going.
In fact, our lo-fi efforts are attempting to better inform you, so that by the time we’re ready for hi-fi, you already have a solid expectation—and understanding—of how things will turn out. Our goal is to have you and your team so involved and confident in our lo-fi explorations that we have no need for inefficient page mockups. Through distinct, focused explorations, you’ll be better equipped to understand how—and why—everything merges together.
