[olivierduval]

Something always bothered me: why using "sketch-like hand-drawn pencil" like style for that kind of tools ?

I understand that "wireframing" is some kind of "brainstorming" tool, so it is used with a pencil and a whiteboard in a meeting room and require to draw/erase fast iteratively... so it's the "right" tool for this job...

But as soon as you use a computer instead of a pencil, why not have a "realistic" and "clean" look instead of this kind of quick-and-dirty sketch-like style? It's an honest question

Is it because designers are most used to this style? Is it because it make more clearly appear the essential points (for example: a list) and avoid discussion like "is this text exactly in this color ?"

[estsauver]

The reason that I've heard used repeatedly is that a shocking percentage of folks who aren't Technology producers can't separate visual quality from "doneness" of a project. If you show some business folks something that looks like it works, they'll mentally update the project to "Nearly done!" and then everything else after that becomes "Unreasonable delays."

[appendix-rock]

Yes. This is precisely it. There aren’t two sides to this, just people that haven’t themselves experienced this absolutely inevitability. These sorts of inexact-looking tools are worth their weight in gold for that reason alone.

[dmje]

I presented a wireframe to a curator at The Science Museum once years ago - even after lots of "please bear in mind this is just a prototype" type disclaimers, his first response was "surely it'll have more colour and pictures than this?".

So. Yeh.

[mhuffman]

I have had prospective clients do it from non-interactive graphic mock-ups -- just pictures! They assumed that was the hard part and just "wiring up the buttons" would be a short simple task. Those were frustrating discussions.

[com]

Devil’s advocate … why shouldn’t this be true? That’s how HyperCard worked, right?

[mhuffman]

In this particular case, there were user accounts, listings of items per user, calculators of various sort, multiple API integrations, and on and on. They understood by the end of the discussion, but seeing an image of something that looked complete was enough to trick their mind into thinking a lot of development work had occurred when, in fact, none had occurred. Only preliminary graphic design had occurred. This was earlier in my career. I typically use wire-frames or zoomed-in detail images now along with starting the discussion by letting them know that these are just graphic ideas, there has been no development yet, we are just at the stage that we want to be sure we are matching their vision.

[ted_dunning]

Well, sure. If all you want is buttons.

But if you want reasonable portability of the interface across different devices, and scale, and connection quality there's more to do.

Even just getting an interface that responds cleanly to resizing can be trickier than it looks because what is important changes as aspect and scale change. How you present things may categorically change.

And this doesn't even start on talking about how to get the backend to where it matches the implied functionality of the front end.

[dspillett]

This is unfortunately very true. You also have to be very careful with word/phrase choice in discussion about future work: people often hear “what we could do, is…” as “there is already a full feature that allows you to configure the tool to do…”.

You really have to drill home that ideas and possibilities are just that, and not concrete features that they could start using tomorrow.

[edmundsauto]

Why is this unfortunate? If it weren’t true and people could separate the things, would we really be better off?

I ask because this guy s a common lament, but I’ve never figured out why. It shouldn’t be a surprise or (to me) disappointment that the fidelity of a communication also carries signal about the status.

[mionhe]

Unfortunate because it's relatively easy now to mock-up the pretty part well enough to be mistaken for the real thing. Which people who don't have experience in this field then do, and get often get confused or upset even.

Example of this from another industry: working in manufacturing, a client wouldn't listen to our explanations about why their part wasn't ready to be molded in plastic. (lot's of design issues that would make it impossible to get out of the mold or lead to extreme cosmetic imperfections). To prove their point that their part designs were ready, they held up a 3d print of their part and said, "See? It's right here! You just have to do this!" This led to a half hour of answering questions before they started to understand that the two fabrication processes were very different and had different requirements.

I think the unfortunate part is really the time you have to sink into helping someone understand that's often unpaid, in my experience.

[dspillett]

The problem is that it is easy to give one part of the communication, the visual, more fidelity than the rest, but that part is what people laugh into no matter what you communicate by other means (verbal, written).

So we, unfortunately, have to make effort to dumb down, or at least carefully manage, the fidelity of that part.

[Groxx]

There is definitely this, but also: if it looks "refined", people start getting attached to what they see, and it affects how they react to the final product.

Any change from that haphazard throwaway with nice colors is suddenly a change they have opinions about, because it feels like a change.

If you show them something that's obviously not what will ship, they don't get as attached.

---

This is also partly a "most people don't understand the design process" thing, and just how much reworking and restarting is generally necessary to get an actually-good end result. If they see hundreds of mockups (or even sketches), they'll wonder why you haven't made hundreds of products, rather than those being merely tools used to think along the way.

[duggan]

This is also what I've heard and experienced.

Actually I don't think "technology producers" are entirely excluded from this bias either. I've assumed more complexity than there was in reality (possibly due to my background in infrastructure and backend), but other developers I've worked with certainly fall more into the trap of "there's a UI? now it's just a simple matter of CRUD."

[viraptor]

While this is likely true for designs, I believe there's more to it. I switched from straight to cartoon lines for my architecture / planning diagrams and suddenly started getting more unprompted comments about how they're clear and approachable.

Personally I also prefer the hand-drawn style, but can't put my finger on why. There's something about the uneven lines filling out the space better, while still defining the shapes well.

[llamaimperative]

I think you're pointing to the positive case of the same effect, which is that people use "hints" from the level of detail of something to determine the level at which they ought to inspect something.

Lower fidelity puts the viewer in a more conceptual mode of assessment, and there they can more easily perceive the clearness/approachability of your concepts.

[mguerville]

And criticize the colors, shading, exact sizes of UI elements, etc. instead of the underlying holistic UX

[johnchristopher]

I almost got burned out from this, this year. Never again will I use clean and production-ready assets for prototypes submitted to decision makers.

[gadders]

I remember in the early 00's this book suggested literally prototyping on paper first. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Paper-Prototyping-Interfaces-Intera...

I think this was then expanded to be "paper-looking".

But yes, for the reasons you state.

[netghost]

A slightly different take.

If everything is either an obvious sketch, or pixel perfect you can get decent feedback, but a design that is just a little off in jarring ways will distract people from the functionality or design intention.

[Lio]

I think Kathy Sierra used to wrote about this quite a bit. She's actually referenced by Balsamiq I think.

[rpastuszak]

A) Make it easier to focus on the core aspects of the problems instead of obsessing with details (applies to both designers and "reviewers")

B) An "unfinished" messy design is an invitation for critical feedback. If you give people something that looks too polished, they might be afraid that they'll break it, that they don't understand it, that they can't give feedback that is "good enough".

In short: if it looks like a toy people will play with it.

* C) The reason many of these tools look like Balsamiq has more to do with the tech of the late 00s/early 10s. This specific style of vector art was pretty easy to achieve in Flash.

[Beretta_Vexee]

This style says ‘it's a draft’ ‘it's an idea’. This is very important for communication within the team. It also allows you to concentrate on the essential points and not on the details (I don't like this font, the centring isn't perfect, etc.).

To my great surprise, even for training courses, this style encourages questions and interaction with the students. There's a whiteboard feel to it which suggests that the presentation isn't set in stone.

[specialist]

Right. The more polished a rendering is, the more people are emotionally attached to it. Keeping it rough enables brainstorming, whatifs, etc.

Ages ago, when CAD was new, architects would show customers tracings (of plots). For all the same reasons.

The practice was so common that my buddy (also an architect) created a "hand plot" driver for AutoCAD. "Messy" hand drawn look instead of precise line work. The driver was huge popular.

[ramraj07]

If I draw something in balsamiq, I’m typically “forgiven” for how basic the design looks. Try and do the same in let’s say MS paint and you could be called unprofessional and lazy. But this style seems to communicate strongly that this is a basic barebones wireframe.

Honestly it also looks better.

[victorbjorklund]

I usually dont use wireframes like this but one benefit is that it clearly communicates "this is NOT a finished design". Way to many times you bring a figma/mvp to get feedback on the "big picture" like the user flow etc but people get stuck on "the margin on that box is wrong" or "can we use another font?" when they see a design that looks like a "finished" product. You dont have that issue with wireframes.

[ashildr]

It’s an abstraction that makes people focus on the part that is relevant for the discussion at hand, and not on implementation details.

[mitchbob]

One of the most valuable things you can do with early prototypes is have prospective users try them, to see whether they're understandable and meet users' needs. When a prototype looks unfinished, users understand that it can be changed, and you can collaborate with them and explore ideas for making the prototype better.

[veenified]

Sometimes the pixel perfect details don't matter for a use case, so why set the hi-fi expectation for both the designer and developer. The designer can get caught up in choosing colors and pixel-perfect layout, and similarly the developer implementing on that design might unnecessary time attempting to match the hi-fi design.

[niklauslee]

Psychologically reduces obsession with the perfect drawing.

[codegeek]

Exactly. I feel the same way. After lot of research, I settled on Whimsical for doing mockups/wireframes. Good Balance between Simplicity and Power. Only complain is clickable prototyping which is not available. If they add that, I would never leave Whimsical for prototyping.

[adastra22]

Because the final product will require tons of details to have been thought through, which can quickly become bike-shedding derailments. How many times have you had to say “this is just example styling—we can tweak it later”? The hand drawn sketch conveys that implicitly.

[shagie]

> Something always bothered me: why using "sketch-like hand-drawn pencil" like style for that kind of tools ?

https://napkinlaf.sourceforge.net (one of my favorites from back in the day)

> The Napkin Look & Feel is a pluggable Java look and feel that looks like it was scrawled on a napkin. You can use it to make provisional work actually look provisional, or just for fun. It is released under a BSD-style license

> The idea is to try to develop a look and feel that can be used in Java applications that looks informal and provisional, yet be fully functional for development. Often when people see a GUI mock-up, or a complete GUI without full functionality, they assume that the code behind it is working. While this can be used to sleazy advantage, it can also convince people who ought to know better (like your managers) that you are already done when you have just barely begun, or when only parts are complete. No matter how much you speak to their rational side, the emotional response still says "Done!". Which after a while leads to a later question: "That was done months ago! What are they doing? Playing Quake?" A good article on this is Joel on Software's “The Iceberg Secret, Revealed”.

... and that's the place that I remember where to find this blog post:

Don't make the Demo look Done - https://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/...

> When we show a work-in-progress (like an alpha release) to the public, press, a client, or boss... we're setting their expectations. And we can do it one of three ways: dazzle them with a polished mock-up, show them something that matches the reality of the project status, or stress them out by showing almost nothing and asking them to take it "on faith" that you're on track.

> The bottom line: How 'done' something looks should match how 'done' something is.

> Every software developer has experienced this many times in their career. But desktop publishing tools lead to the same headache for tech writers--if you show someone a rough draft that's perfectly fonted and formatted, they see it as more done than you'd like. We need a match between where we are and where others perceive we are.

The infographic in this post ( https://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/feedbackim... ) is especially important because the how it looks changes what type of feedback you get.

I had a project where I grabbed the stylesheet and header from another similar project while working on it... and spent a week discussing with management about what color blue it should be when the questions I needed answering were "does this page flow make sense?"

[rendaw]

It's the first bullet point in TFA, right after the big screenshot.

> Stress-free hand-drawn style ... A hand-drawn style reduces stress on perfection and allows you to express ideas quickly.

[olivierduval]

(to be honest, I find this "pencil-like" look a bit like MS Comics for fonts, ugly and unprofessional... so I really don't understand why designer tool use it so much)

[toyg]

Anybody who's ever been in a few meetings that try to put together stakeholders, designers, and developers, know how it will inevitably descend in painful back and forth about a shade of hue or an icon size. People get distracted by colors and graphics, and fail to provide actual feedback on functionality and layouting - which are the hardest bits to change later.

The point of this style is to communicate that it's a rough draft, so that people focus on the essential implementation and functionality requirements, the hard stuff. It's easy to give it a lick of paint later. (It also keeps expectations low, so that the final result will feel like you're overdelivering. But that's just bonus.)

[olivierduval]

For those "downvoting" this comment, please: I wrote it right after my initial post, before any answer, to make my initial post clearer. I certainly should have added this to the main post.

Now that I have all these answers, I understand better. But cant delete or modify this comment. So sadly it's here for eternity :-(

Thanks a lot for your insightfull comments to the original post. Actually, I now think that I will use these method to help getting more feedback from users