I imagine over the centuries that practitioners of any craft have debated the absolute necessity or utter uselessness of various techniques and tools employed in their craft. The user-experience profession is no different. Recently the UX [insert social media of choice]-o-sphere has been bouncing around the topic of how to communicate a thing-that-doesn’t-yet-exist to a client or developer.

Some of the debate centers on speed of transmission – the ‘fail fast, fail often’ camp advocates low-fidelity, skip the mockups, get it in peoples’ hands and iterate. Their counterparts sniff at the lack of craft and attention to detail; getting it wrong doesn’t always lead to enlightenment. Members of this camp cite the benefits of creating detailed personas and immersive experiences  in order to truly create meaningful experiences. There are even companies with open positions desiring ‘passionate creators of pixel-perfect designs’.

My take? One tenet of this profession is that context is crucial – I believe  it’s no different here.  If we can communicate a layout or behavior through a sketch, there is no need to create a mockup image with every pixel in place (no matter how tempting it may be to push pixels vs. write up those requirements). But where low-fidelity messages might be garbled in transmission, where users and their goals are only dimly understood, where a ‘wow!’ response is necessary – then by all means, flourish that stylus.