How far wireframes reflect in final visual design? Should visual designer leverage the final design or stick to the wireframe shared by UX designer?

Question

When UX designer works with visual designer, often times it happens, after providing wireframe with clear annotation/explanation, visual designer tends to leverage the concept (may be want to make edge over UX designer  )and it may cause wireframe to get deviated from its initial thoughtful concept. Now, how far UX designer give some room for visual designer for his/her own conceptualization.

Could someone please share how it’s being dealt in his/her own organization, I mean real world practices, than how it should be done.

Answer 1

Could someone please share how it’s being dealt in his/her own organization

For sure, but it won't be very useful, since every organization does it their own way.

Ultimately, you should do it in a way that makes your UX team work well together and product great user experiences. For some teams, that could literally mean napkin sketching for wireframes, which then leads directly into prototyping.

For other teams, it could mean very high fidelity wireframes that are finessed over and over again.

Personally, I don't like it when UX and VD work separately in a stepped process. As Matt points out, you can't really have one without the other so they really need to be working in-sync from the beginning. One way to handle that is to have UX designers that are also UI designers. That's not always practical, so in that case, have UX designers and UI designers constantly working together and iterating through their work as a team.

Answer 2

The best way to avoid this situation is to work together from the start.

The UX Designer's role is to understand the user and business needs and tothink in terms of overall user journeys not individual screens.

The UI Designer's role is in the styling and brand implementation.

If you work together from the start and understand your specific responsibilities then you should have a shared understanding and there shouldn't be any surprises. Handing over completed wireframes without any input from the visual designers is an inefficient way to work.