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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 ?"

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."
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.
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.

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.
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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.

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.

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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.

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."

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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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Psychologically reduces obsession with the perfect drawing.
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.
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