L2 Fat Marker Sketches

What’s the best level of detail one should use to communicate an idea?

Let’s take the most simplest, benign format: the humble paper napkin sketch.

It makes the representation of the idea too crude, but on the flip side, it actually welcomes the audience, offering them a safe space to critique the idea. It suggests them to provide constructive feedback without any hesitance.

I would call this as an L1 sketch, as in “Level one fidelity”. This could very well just be a wireframe diagram.

While sketching ideas for storytelling, I spend some time grappling with the right level of abstraction so that I don’t slow things down, or lose the size/shape of the ideas appearing in the corner of our brains, or the tips of our tongues.

And my conclusion here is that not all ideas SHOULD be loose and to be represented as an L1 sketch. Here, it can also create room for misinterpretation, with the audience having a wrong picture of the idea in their minds, and you might spend more time clarifying what the “core” idea is.

So, sometimes you go further than an L1 sketch.

On the farthest extreme of fidelity as an L4 sketch, you have the Lovable, or Claude Code generated high-fidelity prototypes/mockups. Especially with the recent AI tools for prototyping being adopted, it’s become far easier to generate high-fidelity prototypes with a quick prompt. The user can click, drag, move, explore all possible interactions. And the earlier notion that “high fidelity prototypes” take time to make and test, is no longer valid in this day and age.

As L4 sketches are highly-polished, and gives the appearance of being “finished”. In that state, you might get lesser feedback, but they might be more exact and directed… The users might say, “hey when I click on this, I want it to be dragged from X to Y…”. They have much more affordances in the medium which they can direct and provide constructive criticism on..

Between L1 prototypes (paper-napkin sketches) and L4 (Lovable prototypes) you also have a spectrum in between. And I think there are still highly relevant use cases for an “L2 sketch”. For this, I remixed the idea from Jason Freid’s Shape Up Book where he talks about “Fat marker sketches”. It’s still a high-level drawing, but it goes one-level deeper. This balances the need to help people “get” the idea without going too far into detail.

There is some nuance here for an L2 sketch as one needs to ensure that the right balance of vagueness and concreteness is maintained.

Let’s say you’re describing the UI (payment form preview), in case of L1 sketch you still wouldn’t provide much detail on the journey (you’re just putting a box describing the function, not HOW the UI behaves or responds). That’s still a black box. To describe the journey as well, you might have to go two levels deeper (L2)

L2 Fat marker sketches can be very effective in such cases; you just need to take more care to label them cleanly on the UI, describing the payment form as well as how the user interacts with it.

As the saying goes, ‘Medium is the message’, and while we might put in efforts to communicate the idea, it’s also a prudent decision to put efforts in finding the medium that represents this desired fidelity.

So we might just have to nudge the slider on the fidelity scale, to arrive at the right one: if it’s a napkin sketch of a wireframe diagram, or a highly fungible interactive Lovable prototype. I’m still learning to choose my mediums more wisely..