Low-fi or Hi-fi wireframes?

Both. Low-fi for working out the broad strokes earlier on, hi-fi for refinement before getting into mockups.

Over the years, we’ve managed to get out of creating documentation as deliverables business. The practice of fetishizing documentation is still useful for:

• insecure junior design teams who use it to distract from a lack of strategic insight
• institutional communications department PMs that need to justify their existence by lording over designers/devs
• large agencies who need more deliverables they can bill for to compensate for lost media buying revenue

For the rest of us, documentation practices like wireframing help us get at the right information at the right stage of a project.

The low-fi sketches we make with sharpies on paper and whiteboards are kind of like side math you do when solving a problem. The messier they are, the less attached you get to them. The messier you let them be, the quicker you can spit them out. The more idea you can explore. Their role is to help uncover and consider big ideas, opportunities, and hurdles.

We use them individually, in groups, and with clients. But again, they’re not a deliverable, they’re an exercise. Sometimes, if our clients are in another city/country, we might shoot a video walking through the problems we’ve solved, assumptions we’ve made and biases we’ve used as criteria to frame the problems solved in the wireframes.

Sometimes, if our clients are in another city/country, we’ll shoot a video walking through/relating the problems we’ve solved, assumptions we’ve made, and biases we’ve used as criteria to frame the problems.

Low-fi wireframing surfaces questions and posits answers.

Hi-fi wireframing tests the answers arrived at through low-fi sketches. Hi-fi still brings up new questions, but far fewer than the rough sketching does.

And because they’re more detailed, they force you to slow down and consider the questions differently. Sometimes they make us go back and consider our architecture or even how we think about content. Designers are people too, and [tweet]sometimes we just need to see something sufficiently fleshed out to realize we could tell a story better[/tweet]. We need clearer hierarchy. We need less information. You get the point.

The fact is that, as in the image above, we’re still refining content ideas while we’re developing. So a better sense of what needs to be there often leads to some back and forth.