Match the visual fidelity of your design to your progress addressing the UX
If you show something shiny, they’ll assume it’s done
One irony of being a designer is that the shiny interfaces you put in your portfolio aren’t what you work on daily.
Your portfolio pieces are the end result of a lengthy design process. Generating that level of visual fidelity at any other point usually leads to trouble.
This is especially true if you work with people that aren’t familiar with UX Design.
I usually show low-fidelity prototypes instead of polished design drafts until much later in the design process.
It doesn’t seem like it should be this way. After all, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with creating beautiful and polished interfaces.
But the problem comes with the polish Designers often put into our prototypes. Since we pay a lot of attention to the details on the page, we can accidentally mislead stakeholders into assuming that the design is almost done.
This is the case even if we label it a work in progress. To understand why this might be, let’s turn our attention to the world of game development.
The problem of work in progress
How many times have you seen art for a video game that seems eerily similar to the final product?
This is called ‘concept art,’ but in reality, it’s a misunderstood measure of progress like polished Design prototypes might be.
In truth, there are two different types of art.
Actual concept art is sketches that are done quickly at the beginning of the process for generating designs, exploring ideas, and giving art direction.
Then there’s promotional art, which is done a lot later during production, made to look beautiful and generate hype for your product.
Game development, like UX Design, goes through several project stages with different purposes. As a result, it’s important for the visual fidelity of the sketch to match the stage that you’re at.
But if you were to show a polished design early on in either process, this might cause you a lot of trouble. It doesn’t matter if there are “Work in Progress” stickers or “Not the final product” labels. A polished design can easily mislead because it looks further along than it is.
One of the things to remember is that when it comes to UX Design, we’re trying to solve a problem. That involves understanding user needs, usability problems, and opportunities for improvement. From that, we can turn user research into a prototype and user test it to find design solutions that create good user experiences.
These things take a lot of time and effort, and you don’t want to handicap yourself by forcing yourself on a shorter time frame. But that’s what might happen if you showcase a polished design. You may be only 10–15% along the way of addressing a problem and trying to solve it, which is why you might put a “Work in Progress” label on it. But if your stakeholders see a polished interface, they might assume that you’re 80% of the way there. At that point, why shouldn’t developers start building the basic interface framework? They don’t need to wait until you’re 100% done with the design, after all.
Trying to argue against this when you have such a polished interface only makes it seem like you’re stalling for no apparent reason. If you show them something shiny, they’ll assume it’s done.
So how do you avoid these problems? The answer is simple: match your visual fidelity to the level of progress you’ve made in problem-solving.
Match fidelity to the level of problem-solving you have
UX Designers tend to follow this general path for creating a digital user experience:
user flow > sketch > wireframe > visual design components > prototype
We start by getting a general understanding of the user and what they do with their workflow. We then create sketches to explore design ideas. From there, we can then wireframes and prototypes as details of the user experience become known.
However, there may be a few external factors that often tempt designers to skip some of these steps.
The first usually comes if you’re re-designing a product. Your team may give you pushback, as “we already know a lot of the earlier steps.” They might even have business workflows or documents that other ‘designers’ made. So they may want a visual update.
The second is when you’re working with executives (or other people in high positions) who may not have much time or understanding of UX. You may feel like it needs to be a polished interface. Otherwise, they won’t engage with (or be burdened by) UX.
Lastly, you might find that maintaining multiple design artifacts, sketches, and prototypes for multiple projects can be troublesome. As a result, you might be tempted to work on and show your actual prototype instead of maintaining different files.
None of these are a good reason to skip steps with design fidelity. Here’s how to address these problems.
Sometimes you’re climbing the wrong mountain.
Re-designs are where you’re likely to run into some form of resistance if you try to start from scratch. It can be for many different reasons.
Some people might like the old design. Others might have invested a lot of time and effort into learning it and don’t want to learn something new. Some people might have even had their names on the projects as leads.
As a result, they might only want the most minor of changes. For a few projects, that may be all that’s required. But don’t let this type of resistance keep you from following your design process. If a project was problematic enough for somebody to spend time, money, and personnel on it, that means it needs the entire design process.
Somewhere along the way, decisions were made (or not made) that resulted in a product that required a re-design. It’s not your job to retrace every meeting and decision to figure out what misstep was made, and this is what you should point out if you get pushback.
Instead, you should use previous business and design documents as a reference but still go through all of the design process steps to make sure that you’re not patching something together. You’ll save a whole lot of time and effort, even if it doesn’t feel like that. But that’s not the only reason.
Trust in the UX Methods:
UX practitioners sometimes present to influential people in organizations, including executives and even CEOs. It can be challenging not to feel intimidated and feel like you need to show something incredibly polished at those meetings.
Coming to a meeting with a rough paper sketch when you’re meeting with Fortune 500 executives sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen. But in those cases, what you should polish isn’t the fidelity of the design: it’s your comfort level with speaking about the methods.
The UX methods that you’ve learned and practiced have been tested and succeeded in hundreds if not thousands of case studies, including critical organizations. But the tools that you use in those methods aren’t that sophisticated.
Workshops, held by the Nielsen Norman Group, often involve executives and other influential people working with paper and Post-Its.
https://www.nngroup.com/
So rather than polishing a design for your stakeholders, refresh your knowledge of the problem, the context, and possible methods you can use at the moment.
Drawing something on a whiteboard while talking, facilitating conversations about UX, and visualizing ideas through paper sketches or other techniques can be a more productive (and practical) way to engage with executives.
Use a sketch filter/add-on in prototyping software
Lastly, one thing you can do to avoid showing off a polished design (if that’s what you’re primarily working on) is to use the sketch filter in whatever design software you use.
I’ve found options in both Axure and Figma that allow you to quickly change your wireframe into lower fidelity and look closer to a sketch.
Neither of these should take much time to change, as they usually involve checking a box or importing a copy of your prototype, but doing this can avoid visual fidelity issues.
If “Work in Progress” and “Warning Labels” aren’t working to make sure that your team doesn’t mistake your prototype for a polished design, changing the visual design sure will.
Make sure that you give your design process the time you need
There’s no getting around it: designing a great user experience takes time.
You need to spend time understanding the product in detail, problems both users and businesses are facing, design a solution to address these needs, and test that with users to see if you’ve come up with the right approach.
Creating a polished design early on can hamstring your process.
You don’t want to lead your team to believe that you’re further along than you are. Instead, make sure the fidelity of your visuals matches how far along you are in the process.
This will allow you enough time to design something that users will love.
Kai Wong is a UX Specialist, Author, and Data Visualization advocate. His latest book, Data-Informed UX Design, goes over small tweaks you can make to your data that can improve your UX Design process.