Wireframing and Prototyping

"Should I just build this in Figma at full fidelity, or sketch it first?" is a question every designer answers dozens of times a week without thinking about it, and it's exactly the question an interviewer is testing when they ask you to justify a wireframe, hand you a whiteboard marker, or ask "what's your prototyping process." The honest answer isn't a tool preference — it's a judgment about what you need to learn next and what level of finish would help or hurt learning it. Candidates who treat fidelity as a ladder they're climbing toward "done" give away that they haven't internalized why the earlier, uglier artifacts exist at all.

This subject treats wireframing and prototyping as one continuous decision space — how finished something looks (fidelity) and how much it responds (interactivity) — rather than two disconnected skills. It builds directly on the Double Diamond from ux-vs-ui-and-the-design-process: wireframing and prototyping are the tools of the second diamond's Develop and Deliver phases, and the fidelity choices covered here are what makes that diamond's diverge-then-converge shape actually work in practice rather than just as a diagram.

By the end, you should be able to name what each fidelity level is for, explain the cost-of-change curve without hand-waving, and — critically for live interview exercises — narrate a fidelity decision out loud instead of silently picking one. None of this is about mastering a specific tool; every point below applies whether you're holding a marker, a stylus, or a keyboard shortcut.