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Sketching 101: Fidelity

 2 years ago
source link: https://blog.prototypr.io/sketching-101-fidelity-8f1507984b04
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TL;DR — it makes a difference whether your sketches are rough or polished. Because of the time you invest and because roughness (low fidelity) encourages ambiguity and possibilities, where polish (high fidelity) supports decision making and locking things in.

A kind of .. “technical” aspect of sketching has to do with fidelity. I don’t think you are disqualified from sketching because you don’t think a lot about this - but as always, it’s valuable to know something, to be aware of what fidelity means, and how it impacts your work.

Fidelity: The degree of faithfulness, or accuracy, or detail, of your representation.

Meaning that a low-fi sketch doesn’t represent all details of the design you’re working on, whereas a high-fi sketch is a much more accurate representation. Being conscious about the level you’re working at is important for three reasons:

  1. The time you spend
  2. Whether you want to diverge or converge
  3. Whether you want others to be able to understand what you’re sketching

Reason 1: Time

Design is an explorative and iterative process. If you spend a lot of time polishing one sketch, that means you have less time for sketching other possibilities. If your aim is to explore and generate possible solutions, or iterate on existing ones .. time is a factor. You will simply be able to make more sketches if you only spend a couple of minutes on each sketch.

Reason 2: Diverging and converging

Diverging means generating more possibilities, whereas converging means narrowing the field. Creating options, versus deciding on options. Fidelity has a part to play here as well. Low fidelity sketches with very few details are ambiguous and suggest how somethingcouldbe, supporting divergence. Opposite this, high fidelity sketches tend to define how theyshouldbe, supporting convergence. Both because of the detail in them, and because of the time you invested creating them.

Imagine a whiteboard sketch with thick lines. It’s impossible to add a lot of detail because of the fat markers. This means you automatically tend to focus on the broad strokes, rather than getting bogged down in details. You can also erase, add or modify something very easily with whiteboard markers.

Now imagine instead an elaborate pen or pencil sketch with lots of details and perhaps even realistic content such as actual copy. To create this you have to make a lot of concrete decision. That’s convergence at work — you’re making decisions, not exploring options.

My point is: it’s not a case of good versus bad. It’s what you’re after in the current situation. If you want to generate possibilities and explore .. go for low fidelity. But if you already know a bit more about what you want to do – If you’ve explored solutions already and now you want to lock in details — go for high fidelity, and in fact: go for digital wireframes! Forget paper sketches altogether, since you might as well take advantage of the things “digital” is good at (easy duplication, sharing, instancing, etc.)

Reason 3: Readability for others

When I sketch for my own eyes only.. my work can be incredibly rough and messy. I know what I mean, so I can decode my sketches. Others.. perhaps not so much. So that’s the final reflection on fidelity for now: if you are collaborating with others, it is of course necessary to create “good-enough-fidelity” work for others to be able to see what it’s supposed to be.

A special note here: sometimes you actually collaborate with yourself. Bear with me — what I mean is, when you put ideas down on paper, and come back later … you are not the same person. Time has passed, and you’re not in the same moment as you were when you created your sketches. This means you might not be able to understand the super messy squigglies you made earlier. It also means that you are able to reflect on and evaluate your sketches much better, if you allow some time to pass. You can approach your sketches and evaluate them more objectively. If this is part of your way of working, “future you” will definitely thank you for going good-enough-fidelity.

Thanks for reading!

I hope you found this article worth your time. If for some weird, obscure reason you want to support my writing, you can do that here: https://flattr.com/@skjoldbroder


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