Today's design principle is all about why Balsamiq is better than Figma.* I posted the following comment on Michelle's post below. We seem to have forgotten on of they key guidelines when designing: The fidelity of the artifact should match the fidelity of the thinking. There's lots of reason for this, many mentioned below and in the comments, but the biggest one is to keep the thinking and feedback at the right abstraction level. If you provide high-fidelity mocks you're going to get detailed feedback on the visual design or specific language. If you provide lo-fidelity mocks, you can talk about broader issues of navigation and composition of the page, which really should come before any hi-fi thinking or feedback. This is why Balsamiq is such a powerful tool, it helps keep the thinking at the correct fidelity. This is the fourth in the series of my #ux #designprinciples Find the rest on my profile. * sometimes https://lnkd.in/g8K6zeEU
Head of UX Design @ ChaiOne | UX Strategy + Design | A UXer with an MBA, Because UX Is Serious Business
🛑 Enough with the High Fidelity Mockups We know that Figma will go away one day, or drastically change. Tools do not make you anything except a tool user. With the death of InVision and constant posts about Figma lately, it’s time for some actionable advice. The biggest issue I see with the obsession with tools is the rise of high-fidelity everything. Our clients and stakeholders have now been trained to expect super high-fidelity mocks of every possible screen and interaction. All of these high-fidelity screens are super expensive to produce and keep updated, even with design systems and symbols and repeatable elements, etc. We have made ourselves production designers pushing pixels, instead of highly trained problem solvers. If you work in an agency, you have a finite amount of time to do your UX work. Why waste a huge portion of it doing production work, changing the same screens over and over again? Our clients don’t need 100 high-fidelity screens that look pretty, they need you to solve their specific problem. Problems don’t get solved in Figma. We need to go back to basics and grab a notepad and pencil and start doing way more THINKING and a bit less DOING. We need to train our clients/stakeholders to accept lower fidelity sketches and mocks and to focus on the problems being solved, not the width of a border or the hex code of a font. We also need to train our devs to not need complete mocks with all the final copy and all the fit and polish to even get started. They deal with the separation of code and UI all the time, so they can figure out how to build from a system level instead of a page level, especially if we provide good specs and learn to talk to our devs and partner with them. ✏ So next time you enter the design phase of a UX project (here’s hoping some research and discovery was already done!), leave Figma alone and crack open a fresh Moleskin instead.
Sarah Emerson
4mo
I’ve used Balsamiq happily for 10+ years, as a PM. It helps me communicate or explore ideas without confusing anyone that I’m proposing anything about the visual design 😂
Agile Coach | Scrum Master | Project Manager | Product Owner | Product Manager
4moLove that you're giving love to Balsamiq. In my PM days it was a helpful tool for sharing ideas with designers. Deliberately low-fi, it forced me to focus on the "what" and "why" rather than the "how."