The Virtues of Low-fi

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.

Presented at Amsterdam UX Crawl @ Catawiki in Amsterdam.

Transcript

1. The Virtues of Low-fi Stephen Hay @ Catawiki UX Crawl • July 25, 2018
2. Hi! I’m Stephen.
3. Design/UX Deliverables
4. “The perfect is the enemy 
 of the good.” —Voltaire
5. Not the thing. Not the thing. The thing.
6. Design processes
7. 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!”
8. Gradual low to high Low High Kinda high Kinda high Kinda high Kinda high Kinda high
9. Long low / short high Low-fi High-fi “I’m starting to understand the problem.”
10. The most important question:
 What’s most important?
11. The design funnel https://changethis.com/manifesto/show/48.04.DesignFunnel Many designers start here. Define Discover Generate Create Design Values & Goals Moods & Metaphors Ideas, Define a concept A Visual Language
12. Most of this can be low-fi
13. 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.
14. The virtues of low-fi
15. 1. Iterations are 
 quick and cheap
16. 2. Low-fi tooling is 
 minimal and flexible.
17. 3. Low-fi answers 
 questions early. “Nice. What about (x)?” “Oh, shit.”
18. 4. Low-fi encourages quantitative ideation.
19. 5. Low-fi encourages 
 “most important” thinking. It’s a meeting between your brain and the problem, with few distractions from tooling and processes.
20. Things that can be low-fi: • Sketching • Storyboards • Diagrams • (Paper) prototypes (but be careful!) • Planning • etc. These are actually subsets of sketching
21. Sketching
22. Sketching is not art.
24. A simple sketching process for ideation…
25. Thumbnails
26. No detail As many as possible As quickly as possible variety
27. Roughs PHOTO: Mike Rohde. Visit his blog: http://rohdesign.com/weblog/
28. Only a few, max. Flesh out your best ideas Focus on more detail (but not too much) Annotate, Ask & Answer questions
29. Thumbnails -> selection -> Roughs -> selection -> Comp/Prototype
30. 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.
31. 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!
32. 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.
33. Thank you! @stephenhay