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I am at a startup, and we are all about 'budling the right thing fast rather than the wrong thing right.'
I am evaluating and improving our current mobile/tablet version of the dashboard. Would it be more effective to share with the team the high-fidelity mockups rather than low fidelity mockups?
and
How many times should I iterate low-fidelity mockups before proceeding high-fidelity mockups?
It's not just as easy as to finish a (let's say StackExchange like site) product at once. So first UX works done and then started to implement it's coding. So the design you're about to work.
UX starts with personas and/or other related documentation studies to be able to wireframing and then it helps to getting up easily with mockup phase.
Like you don't present the work expected from you just in a second, you should consider it as phases of iteration, like wireframing first to not cause bigger breaking changes after started to coding phase. Same for low fidelity mockups, sharing low fidelity mockup with your team after completing it will guide you and then it should be time to consider to high fidelity even with a continuing new iterations on it.
Low-fidelity is for testing the concept: information architecture, navigation design & logical flow and so on.
High-fidelity is for testing the design: visual design, interactions, animations, UI element states (e.g. is it clear that it is disabled or enabled).
So it simply depends on what your question or goal is. When you're in the beginning, you might want to find out if your concept even makes sense to potential users, so you create a rough, low-fidelity prototype. When you're in a later stage and already know the concept makes sense, you might want to find out if the details make sense, so you can't have just a rough sketch, you need a close representation of the real thing.
I found an article that summarized it well:
Low-fidelity prototypes
are often paper-based and do not allow user interactions. They range from a series of hand-drawn mock-ups to printouts. In theory, low-fidelity sketches are quicker to create. Low-fidelity prototypes are helpful in enabling early visualization of alternative design solutions, which helps provoke innovation and improvement. An additional advantage to this approach is that when using rough sketches, users may feel more comfortable suggesting changes.High-fidelity prototypes
are computer-based, and usually allow realistic (mouse-keyboard) user interactions. High-fidelity prototypes take you as close as possible to a true representation of the user interface. High-fidelity prototypes are assumed to be much more effective in collecting true human performance data (e.g., time to complete a task), and in demonstrating actual products to clients, management, and others.
Source: usability.gov
You should always start with the low-fidelity if you want to get things right. Create them, share them with people and iterated on them. Iterate on them until they are right. Once you get them right the high fidelity ones should be faster to build and there shouldn't be that many changes flow wise.
