I'm wireframing in Axure right now, with the words 'wireframing is mostly a waste of time' ringing through my ears. When you're doing high fidelity stuff in Figma, you're doing a LOT more - which includes:

• visiting inspiration sites
• deciding on palette
• deciding on typography
• selecting stock images

and many many more. Whilst you're doing that, and even with keyboard shortcuts and expertise, you're still making a ton of decisions that the greyscale or monochrome wireframe isn't. It's so much faster once you remove the high fidelity and abstract it right down to the structure and interaction design - because what you're really doing is designing journeys, at speed.

I still don't see the point of involving any kind of higher visual fidelity in order to build and test the barebones journey as it evolves. If anything else, it totally distracts - that's why we work in low-fi. We're interested in the mechanics, the behavior, the semantics. The visuals are a skin that augments the structural design, but if you're working in a non-interactive tool like Figma, you can't test it properly....so it's all guesswork, and we know how that turns out.
(spoiler alert: it's high risk, almost cowboy stuff)

Here's what I'll say to every high fidelity designer:

TRY IT OUT! If you were to take your visual design chops and add UCD to it, you would become uber competent and deliver high performance experiences. What's the harm in trying it? Try something different that we KNOW works, but is unfamiliar to you. TRY IT OUT!

If I had a magic wand, I'd convert every Figma user to a Figma x Axure user, then I could get back in my user research box and be a happy boy, supporting shit hot designers doing some very cool work (i.e. behavioural design).

In order to get to that promised land, we all need to be on the same UCD page. We need to meet. UCD is that place.

TRY IT OUT - I guarantee good things happen to you, your team, your products and your career. Oh, and your mental health, because we'll all be delivering huge value, our brands will love us and we'll be one big happy research and design family...aka user centric UXers 😎 😘

#UserCenteredDesign #UX #WireframePrototyping
#collected