With the second half of the Internet coming, what changes do practitioners need to make to cope with the changing environment?
In the ever-changing era of the Internet, how can “user-oriented” designers and “performance-oriented” product managers be transformed into “value-centered” product designers?
After Liu Jin, today we are honored to invite Sun Rui, another author of Butterfly 2, to listen to her views on designers in the Internet era.
Campus + book section
Asynchronous community: Would you please say hello to the readers of the asynchronous community and briefly introduce yourself?
Sun Rui: Hello everyone! My name is Sun Rui. I graduated from the Department of Design and Art of Beijing Institute of Technology with a master’s degree. He is now a venture partner and project director. Served as UE manager and project manager of Yenden Loan. He has rich experience in product design, user research, project and team management, and is an advocate and practitioner of user growth design thinking.
Asynchronous community: What have you been doing since you graduated from master’s Degree? At what point did you become interested in design and user experience work?
Sun Rui: My working experience is relatively simple. My first job was in Yirendai, where I grew from a UE to a chief UE and then to a UE leader and project manager. My second job is in a startup company where I am responsible for projects and products. I majored in industrial design from undergraduate to graduate school, so it was a natural choice to become an interaction designer.
Asynchronous Community: Why did you start writing Butterfly 2? What is the most important thing you learned from writing the book?
Sun Rui: The design department is a supportive department in most companies, and other positions see designers in the same way, even many designers see themselves in the same way. Business leaders often ask us, “How do you measure the value of design to the business?” This question has been asked for three years. After many twists and turns, we finally found the key to unlocking the value of design. Let’s hope this book brings some real change to the industry.
It was an honor to work with Jin on this book. In fact, the biggest harvest is not the book itself, but the harvest of this extremely precious sincere friendship.
Asynchronous community: How do you balance work, writing a book, and family?
Sun Rui: Balance is relative. Different people have different balance points for energy distribution at different stages. As for me, I have no worries at all when it comes to work and writing books, because my husband always respects and supports my choice. To be yourself, to do what you want to do, is a very happy thing. I am busy with my work, and I can only arrange books in the evenings and weekends.
I often tell myself not to fall into the illusion of being busy. Lean thinking has a great influence on me in this process. People’s energy is limited, time is also limited, always adhere to the minimum cost to obtain the maximum value, that work will be easy and get twice the result with half the effort.
Asynchronous Communities: Were there any difficulties with The writing of Cocoon 2? Can you share the back story?
Sun Rui: This is the first time for me. I feel that writing a book itself is not easy. In this process, I admire Jin’s persistence and preciseness. This book has a high requirement for system and logic, so the structure has changed many times, and the content has changed countless times.
Take the illustrations in the book for example, the illustration style has been overturned twice in the middle. Since most of the pictures are drawn in Keynote, the font size and content of all the pictures have also been adjusted many times. If you find any mistakes or omissions in this book, please feel free to let us know.
Asynchronous community: Who would you most recommend Breaking The Cocoon into Butterfly 2? Who do you think will benefit most from reading this book?
Sun Rui: I’d like to recommend it to designers. Designers are the people closest to mastering Design Thinking, but most designers don’t do it well. We often build professionalism through job barriers, but it’s not.
This book has broken down job barriers. It is no longer about design itself, but about Internet product design and cutting-edge thinking and cognitive concepts from a high-dimensional perspective. It is suitable for any Internet practitioner, not only for application research, interactive, visual, product, operation and even technical positions. I think, different people read it will have different harvest.
Working paper
Asynchronous Community: What was the biggest challenge for you in starting your own business after leaving Yurendai? What are the main projects of entrepreneurship? Can I share it with you?
Sun Rui: The biggest challenge is the transformation from micro to macro. As a designer, no matter how much you think you know about the business, that’s just what you know about designing. When you step out of that role and see the big picture of the business, you realize how little perspective you had. The “what” is much harder than the “how”, and design plays a very small part in the “how” (not that design isn’t important, of course).
At this point, you not only need to understand the industry, policy, insight into market opportunities, thinking about business models, but also after aiming at the direction of product and marketing planning to implementation, etc. It’s a great test of one’s general ability, and it’s something you can only do in a startup, which is a big reason I left my comfort zone.
Currently, the entrepreneurial projects I am responsible for mainly involve two directions, one is To B financial services and the other is financial new retail. More specific and we’ll have a chance to share it later.
Asynchronous community: What do you do every day after starting your business? Or what is a typical day like for you?
Sun Rui: Entrepreneurship is no different from ordinary work, but a process of accelerating growth. What might have been done by several positions now needs to be done by one person; You’ll only have six months to learn what would normally take two years. This requires a very big premise, namely abundant physical strength and energy. Therefore, I will pay more attention to health than before, strict rules and control the daily rest and diet, and recently I have picked up the habit of fitness.
After work, I still spend at least two or three hours every day to learn new knowledge and understand the new trends in the industry, such as the blockchain content I have been catching up on recently. Although busy, but also need to squeeze out time to work harvest to do precipitation every day. Is the so-called, bitter its mind, also happy its mind.
Asynchronous communities: After all these years of turning your hobby into a career, do you still feel as passionate about working in interaction design as you did then? How to maintain original intention under heavy work pressure?
Sun Rui: I have been doing interactive work for five years, which is a process of breaking the cocoon. At the end of the five years, I gave myself an answer paper with Breaking the Cocoon into Butterfly 2. I believe in the value of design thinking, which will open up new prospects for my future life.
Therefore, I always believe that design thinking is not the patent of designers, but one of the abilities that everyone should acquire. Although I am no longer a designer, I still use design thinking to solve problems in work and life. The so-called position is just a means and an appearance. Only by grasping the essence of things, improving thinking and cognition, accumulating and improving comprehensive ability can we remain invincible under the general trend of cross-border and integration.
Asynchronous communities: What advice do you have for new graduates who are starting out in the workforce?
Sun Rui: The essence of growth is cognitive upgrading, and cognition without action is pseudo cognition. So be sure to do two things, one hand design related theory study, the other hand on the project at hand practice, and then repeated verification and thinking between the two hands, you will make very fast progress. For example, I once recruited a very good intern, who majored in pure painting. Later, he practiced the project according to “Breaking Cocoon into Butterfly 1”, and then became an interaction designer smoothly.
Some people may ask, how to quickly reach the high dimensional cognition, then read “Cocoon Into butterfly 2”, newcomers are actually more likely to accept cutting-edge thinking. We have a girl who has only been doing interaction for a little over a year, but she is now better than most designers in the industry. In this age of acceleration, growth really requires overtaking in corners.
Asynchronous communities: What knowledge, skills, and qualities do you need to do this job?
Sun Rui: Interaction design is a very comprehensive subject. It’s really hard to say one word or two sentences clearly. Let’s just see the cocoon and butterfly series.
Asynchronous communities: Does innovation require a certain amount of academic or design experience in the field, or does it require an Archimede-like “flash of light”? Or are innovators mostly pragmatic or idealistic?
Sun Rui: There are many levels of innovation. It must be to make better changes on the original basis. Most innovation is empirical. What we often call “inspiration” is based on deep insight. So true innovators have the ability to think and solve problems to get to the bottom of things.
No matter subject or position, they are all just artificial division of human beings. Only by breaking down these so-called boundaries and barriers can you go further on the road of innovation by finding the foundation and principles behind them.
Breaking the Cocoon into a Butterfly 2 — The Revolution of Product-centered Design
Liu Jin, Sun Rui
The book is divided into 3 chapters, a total of 10 chapters. The first chapter analyzes the changes of the environment of the Internet market to help product designers find their own positioning and determine the career evolution route of product designers. The second part introduces the methodology of product designer in detail, explains and explains many concepts such as business canvas, user story map, etc. Combining with different stages of product life cycle, this paper introduces how to grasp product direction, make clear competitive advantage and enhance commercial value. The third chapter explores advanced topics such as product design innovation, improving product design efficiency, and product design communication and growth.
From cocoon to Butterfly: The Path of User Experience Designer
By Liu Jin and Li Yue
As an independent discipline and industry, user experience design is developing rapidly and getting more and more attention. With the emergence of the concept of Internet thinking, the status and attention of “user experience” have been further enhanced and strengthened.
There are plenty of professional ux books out there, but not many that address the many real-world issues ux designers face in the workplace. From the perspective of user experience designers, this book systematically introduces their learning methods, thinking modes, working processes and ways in their career, trying to help designers solve some common problems encountered in projects and find their own career growth path.
The book is written by experienced front-line user experience designers and contains valuable professional experience and professional thinking. It has certain reference value and significance for interaction designers, visual designers and user researchers. At the same time, “Breaking cocoon into Butterfly — The Growth Path of User Experience Designers” is also suitable for product managers, operations, development and other user experience related personnel as well as students of related majors.
Today’s interactive
What would you like to see differently from a book? Why is that? By 17:00, September 6th, please leave a message and forward this activity to moments of friends, and 2 readers will be selected in a lucky draw as a gift of a paper book. (Interview with Sun Rui: It is a happy thing to be yourself and do what you want to do.)
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