I was recently asked a question about the value of low-fidelity wireframing.

When do you do it, and why?

When I started over 12 years ago, no one ever asked this really. But now, with off-the-shelf design systems and companies building UI components as a matter of course, it can be really easy to knock together an idea at high-fidelity.

So why not? It's closer to what the finished article might be, so the feedback's likely to be more valuable. Right?

Wrong (but kinda depends also).

My answer was very similar to Chuck's. For him, the medium of his scrappy handwritten notebooks is the message. It invites play.

Likewise, nothing says to product team colleagues or stakeholders, "this idea's fragile, it needs some work and I want your help", more than a scrappy wireframe.

And very often they do help. And very often we come up with something far better. Which also gets built far better and faster, because more of the team have thought through it with me. Meaningfully. Because that's what lower-fidelity does. It invites more thought.

There's something paralysing about being asked to critique hi-fidelity. Particularly in commercial environments where "more finished looking" is equated to "more finished". No one wants to be the bottle-neck or poop on an idea that looks like it'd help the team tick off that backlog item sooner rather than later.

But that defaults to the pursuit of adequate in my experience. And nothing great got built by adding up a whole lot of adequate.