Why do we begin with low-fi design? Drawing and sketching helps you get ideas out without too much investment. That makes it easier to throw them away when a better idea comes along.
The Desire to Be Perfect
I am working on a project with a friend who is acting as a client for a capstone project with an agile development class. She complained to me that the students were unable to create a simple one-sheet deliverable featuring a proposed design. The problem: “No one set up WordPress yet.” It didn’t occur to them that didn’t need the CMS to start a draft. They could begin with low-fi design by mocking up their ideas in a drawing program or simply sketch it by hand.
Enter Low-Fi Design
When I do in-class studios, I will often make the design students work entirely on paper and whiteboard, no computers allowed, to ideate and create a paper prototype. You can do it in two hours end to end. Is the final deliverable App Store ready? Of course not. But it is enough to move quite a bit toward a testable idea.
Students today, and especially developers, don’t understand the power of a piece of paper that you can throw away. When you start coding (or drafting in WordPress) too soon, you get too married to the code, making it hard later on to incorporate new learnings from your user research. It’s better practice to begin with low-fi design. Stay as low-fi as possible for as long as possible. That’s at least one day of a five-day sprint. Sometimes two (testing the paper artifacts with users). Then “Kill your darlings” before they become too dear.
Origin of the phrase
The phrase “Kill your darlings” (or “murder your babies”) is often attributed to William Faulkner and is a feature of many descriptions of the Beat poets: William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac et al. In fact, the concept “murder your babies” can be traced to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, a British writer and literary critic in a 1916 lecture series at Cambridge. (Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur (2000) [1916]. “XII. On Style”. On the Art of Writing: Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, 1913–1914 (Online ed.). Bartleby.com.)
THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR is a semi-regular column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience.
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