It was a pleasure to work with you, as you and your team made this process a more pleasant experience for our team and the participants.
Karen Perry
We know that some of our clients would likely become distracted by the colors and graphics, and the readable content of a page when the goal is for them to be evaluating it's layout, or navigational features.
So what do we present our clients when they want to see what they are getting for their money?
The answer, we are afraid to say, depends. The fidelity of the wireframes and or prototypes that we present depends on stage of the project and the level of sophistication of our client.
When we are early in the design process and are iterating with clients on general functional and/or navigation issues we use “Sketchy” Prototypes (see http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/sketchy-wireframes) and “filler” text such as Lorem Ipsum We want to minimize the client comments on logos, color, fonts and content and maximize their attention toward what really matters during this stage of the design process.
By combining what looks like a hand-drawn sketch with what is obviously filler text, hopefully we can get stakeholders to focus on the portions of the interface that we are iterating on.
Once we begin showing our client, visually stylized “comps” we have opened up the proverbially Pandora’s box of feedback. Clients will expand there comment and focus mainly on the color, the font, the logo, and, of course the content. If the client is sophisticated enough, we may be able to continue using “filler” on the comps, but most likely we would start incorporating the output of our content strategy sessions and present early drafts of the terminology, nomenclature and content.