[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.