To be precise, digital design in the Internet and mobile fields, or integrated into: user experience design.
Do students BBS, 00 years 01 do school website, 02 do website, 03 do government websites, 04 do Banks and banking regulatory commission (CBRC) systems, 05 do unicom’s official website, do blog to pan shiyi, guo for website, do print, 06 07 do hardware and software design review, do sohu home page and the Olympics live 08, 09 do taobao location update, 10 years of travel and hotel ticket lottery, 11 years of recruitment, 12 years of Windows, 13 years of mobile phone/tablet APP, 14 years of console games and applications, 15 years of automobile intelligence, 16 years of Cui Jian.
I started to contact FrontPage in 1999 and got my first official offer in 2002. I have been doing design for 16 years, and 14 years have passed since I started working officially. In 14 years, I changed 13 jobs, the longest in Microsoft, close to 4 years, the shortest 2 days, is to work for Guo Jingming’s official website, this job I can not do. These years, what kind of company, what kind of cooperation are also seen, for “work” and “work” such words I have become very tired. I’ve been trying to figure out what else to do that would ensure quality of life, make me think about what it means to be busy every day, and give me a chance to broaden my horizons beyond just being a boss in my old circle. Since I’m mainly talking about design here, I’m going to put aside feelings and dreams and talk about my personal experience of design.
What’s the difference between an artist and a designer?
I talk about this at many design conferences and salons: artists are those who create for themselves, and designers are those who create for business. The artist calls the shots, while the designer, for the most part, calls the shots who pays the bills. Sad in a way, especially when dealing with low end clients and tasteless bosses. But with experience, designers can be on an equal footing with clients/bosses, and even need to lead them to breakthrough. As one of my good friends, the boss of Logicdesign, said: “At the beginning, the client always wanted to make a poster or PPT for internal report presentation or external publicity, but after talking with us, they found many interesting things to do, and maybe they did not make the poster they originally wanted.”
The designer’s job is to understand the client’s business intentions and then help him find the means to express them. The medium is not important, as long as the story can be told in the proper way, the medium is secondary. Of course, most designers are first limited by the medium, do web pages to do web pages, do posters to do posters, we call the industry has specialized. I used to be responsible for the long-term cooperation between Microsoft and the professional design industry in China. I had a good relationship with Frog, Tanshuo, ARK, EICO and other well-known design companies. After in-depth communication with them, I realized that the medium restricted the creativity of designers from the very beginning.
So what exactly is the design doing?
Many people understand design as Photoshop, and some designers who have been working for a year or two still think the same way: “Photoshop is so good, you are a great designer”. Look at the gorgeous and dazzling shop signs and promotion pictures on JD.com taobao. Hundreds of pictures stacked together are so delicate and powerful. I think I could never draw them in my life, but I never feel ashamed of it. Many of the designers on my team used to be very good at using tools, and I was already looking blank when I opened the new version of Photoshop.
Make a simple analogy, eat, must use chopsticks? Foreigners will not starve to death if they use chopsticks badly when eating in China. As long as you have a desire, your brain will always drive you to find the right way to achieve the goal, so as long as you have ideas and creativity, in any way, you can complete the design. Photoshop is just a tool, the world is changing fast, and Sketch has long been popular. Even if you don’t have a computer, a pen and paper is enough to produce a good design. I’ve typed thousands of complete lines of HTML with notepad, but there’s nothing admirable about this kind of inefficient, paranoid stupidity.
Design comes down to ideas. Elementary design is making things look good. Advanced design is about making things nice and easy to use. More in-depth design, on the basis of the content, extract ideas, and then use technology and design methods to organize these content, to do things beautifully right — this is not my summary, is the design thinking of Logicdesign.
Let me put it more simply: e-commerce promotional pictures for a whole day, hundreds of layers, dozens of source files; Douban’s home page, three or four color values, text spacing, leave breathing space, half a day to hand over three editions, the source file dozens of K — and douban’s designer is more expensive than e-commerce designers.
Not to mention that the former uses a high-performance computer with a lot of memory, while the latter actually gets the job done on a 5 year old MacBook Air with 2 gigabytes of memory (although they still hide the truth to bully the company into buying the latest iMac).
A previous Interface designer for Windows 8 said of Douban that he had seen a lot of Chinese websites, but “Douban is the only one that has a design, with nice text, spacing and white space.” Meng Chen, douban’s design director, is a low-key man, but he couldn’t hide his pride as he described this to me. What Douban wants to do is to deliver what users want to them in the most effective way.
What is the difference between Internet software design and other designs?
IT is a pity that I have been working in the field of digital design related to Internet and IT for so many years. I also want to cross over to the field of clothing and architectural design, but in the end, I can only do interior design for my own house. In addition, INVITED by BMW, I also had the opportunity to participate in the creative design of MINI’s vehicle intelligent products as a consultant in the first two years.
I divide Internet IT software design and other design into two general categories: on-screen design and off-screen design. At the moment, what really attracts me is what goes beyond the screen. The limited space in the box of computer monitors and mobile phone screens has hardly ignited my enthusiasm. In the startup boom of the past two years, what most people are doing is that you make an app and I will also make an app. Mine is easier to use and has more functions than yours. That’s all. In fact, the concept of “Internet +”, which has been heated by the country, is not new at all. It has been added for many years since I started the enterprise website in 2002. However, intelligent hardware, intelligent home and intelligent car are really interesting breakthrough direction, virtually eliminate the separation between science and technology and traditional industry, let the original rigid existing things become alive, this is a big trend in design.
Of course, even in a society where everything around us is becoming intelligent, I don’t really like design for design’s sake. In the words of Douban design Director Meng Chen: The process of design is the process of discovery. Good design must conform to the laws of nature, which make people comfortable and happy. Good design is not “designed”, because the laws of nature are there, and it is natural to find them and use them to resonate with more people. Microsoft’s launch of flat Metro Design, Apple’s de-skeuomorphic Design and Google’s Material Design are all in the process of stripping the past excessive Design. As I mentioned before, design is about making things right. In the complicated environment of modern society, it is the responsibility of design to deliver the right information quickly and accurately to users effectively. Of course, I often saw the wonderful exquisite design work on the Dribble will collect, I also very like small fire design works of genius, even if I am the hammer mobile non-inductive, but they are still admire for the perfection of the UI grinding, flat, they need to pay one hundred times the cost of time to make a man yue yue oneself work, this is very not easy.
“Maybe one day I’ll be too old to do this, maybe I won’t make enough money to go around, but that’s ok, I’ll look back at what I did and be happy enough.” Saber, the design director of Logicdesign, once said to me. Every time I think of this, I feel a little touched. Compared with those designers who work overtime in front of the computer and turn their back to the gods, those designers who are really working hard and happy for the design are always happier.
Is UX design really valued?
I worked for many years before the post of interaction Design came into being in China. Later, wave after wave of concepts of emotion, usability and Design thinking taught Chinese Design groups, making them more and more vertical and methodological. “User experience” is a phrase that bosses are constantly talking about. Unfortunately, we can see that the current situation is not optimistic, and scientific design aspects such as user research and user role definition are not well implemented in many companies’ product design. Even if you have the right process in place, the design will eventually change because of your boss or other demands from your investors. Big names always emphasize how much they value user experience on stage, but off stage, they actually leave the user experience design department with the least budget, time and say. The most talked about USER experience design on stage is the one thing they don’t want to spend money on.
In “Keep It Simple,” written by Esslinger, the founder of Frog Design, which I translated earlier, there are repeated references to the deep ties between design and products and the company’s top management. Frog has closely tied itself to Apple. Apple has succeeded again by moving from design to corporate strategy rather than aesthetics. The book, titled minimalist Design in Chinese, is finally in print and will go on sale next month.
There are a lot of project leaders or product managers around us who are just doing a job, so UX design for them is just a part of putting clothes on the product. It’s ok to finish it on time and save money. Some bosses and founders, relying on their own success in the business world, are blindly confident that they have a natural knowledge of design and user experience. They are unwilling to hand over professional design work to professional designers, and their faultfinding makes the design team uncomfortable. The Logo of a famous Chinese dating website was designed by the boss himself. A lump of colorful flying made me shocked not by this lump of flying, but by the executives of the company who praised it for its good looks and introduced to me the implied meaning of flying. I had to admit, I was wrong, my taste buds don’t know shit. (The company has introduced a new Logo for the past two years, and the owner’s taste has finally improved, a little.)
Once I was at the opening of a movie such as A Dessert at Yidi Port, and sitting next to me were two middle-aged, successful men discussing their business ventures in a partnership tone. One said that this version of the online review is very poor, mainly the art is not good. The other said firmly: Then hire another artist, two artists, and you can do it. I really don’t understand how someone who has so little knowledge and no respect for design has enough courage to judge that it’s the design and not the product plan (I don’t want to use the term artist instead of designer). There are countless similar groups in China’s entrepreneurial circles. What good things can they do?
Of course, maybe it’s just that they haven’t met a good designer yet. “A lot of things in the world are boring, but I don’t blame them because they don’t have more thoughtful designers.” Saber, director of design at Logicdesign, speaks with great confidence.
In a world where market and user data are leading BAT and other major Internet platforms, it’s a good thing we have websites like Douban that put Design and product drive first. Gail Lei, former Design director of Douban, has been an advocate of Metro Design. “Every space and every line on the page has to be there, and if you can’t explain why that line is there, get rid of it.” Douban is very particular about information design. As long as the information appears in the interface, there is a reason for it, rather than just looking good.
Yet such companies are few and far between.
Right design is not necessarily right, bad experience is not necessarily bad, right?
At the beginning of the year, I talked with Chen Qi, the founder of Mogujie, about Internet design and fashion media. I said THAT I no longer planned to do Internet, let alone e-commerce. There are two reasons. First, I think the fast changing Internet has no time for designers to polish fine works, and quality is no longer the most important thing. Second, most users of e-commerce have no loyalty, no matter how good the design is and how attractive the experience is, it can’t compete with another website which is 10 yuan cheaper.
Thanks to the popularity of computers and the Internet in China in recent years, as well as the rapid development of smart phones and wechat, Internet design can get closer to ordinary people at a lower cost than design in other industries, so the user group of Internet design products is also the largest and the lowest quality. I once made a simple judgment that designers in the Internet industry have the worst taste and lack creativity and imagination compared to designers in other industries (for example, I think there will not be many people who object when I say that the design of JINGdong is in bad taste). And then it became clear that it was up to the user base, that what the average citizen wanted was that kind of design, with the emphasis in red and the price up — that was enough, that was the most effective, that was minimalist art, that the average citizen couldn’t appreciate. Therefore, even if there are many mistakes in the interaction design of wechat that are perverse, it does not prevent the public from holding it every day. Two-dimensional code ugly and excessive abuse, also does not affect businesses and ordinary people on its enthusiasm – in front of our people’s wisdom, the design is not necessarily right.
The various designs of the Internet have been thrown into the dustbin of history in half a year, and there are few true masterpieces that can remain immortal. Now look back 03, 04 years taobao homepage design, there is no doubt that is one tuo excrement, you might say that is too long, then look at 09 in the home page, then don’t call iQIYI, 08 Olympics, I and my big boss after gong yu left sohu, at the same time he started in the, I become taobao first employee of Beijing branch), It’s just a little more elaborate shit. The Internet updates so fast that there is no design precipitation, and I feel embarrassed to put the works of four or five years ago into my resume. Internet design is no longer for high-quality people, so its design requirements have been reduced from high-end to even fools. Fortunately, there are some memorable pieces in the software design direction. I’ve always liked the logo teng Lei, founder of ARKdesign, designed for the Mac version of Office during his time at Frog. Besides software, Chinese websites also have excellent works, Logicdesign three years ago for “month Xiong Zhi” animals Asia foundation web Site (http://www.logicdesign.cn/project/moombear_website/) to 7.86 took AWWWARDS Site of the Day. This is probably the first simplified Chinese website to win this award, and even three years later, it is still very impressive. When Token first started working on the mavs, I thought it was far from design. After all, there was a gap between electric vehicles and modern quality life. But now, when I see more calves on the streets, and the two-wheeled electric cars are better and more durable, I realize the significance of token.
At the end of last year, Logicdesign and I created a fun app for Cui Jian, and are currently updating the next version for cui’s 30th anniversary concert and a series of events. Lao Cui is very open and imaginative, he gave us a lot of room, he said he only knows music, the design decision is completely left to us. Logicdesign and I are very happy to have such cross-border cooperation and to have a complete say in design.
“You know, those design companies outside, how much money, how big the orders, I am not saying THAT I am not interested, but I care more is to use unique ideas to make customers’ products shine.” Saber at Logicdesign has an infectious commitment to creativity and design.
So what should we do, how to do things, so that these efforts can be handed down and influence the society?
“Chinese Experience” is my experience report on the usage habits and feelings of digital and intelligent products in China. It is not evaluation, and it has a completely different perspective and writing way from the evaluation of process cold ice. I do not do data and data porters, also do not do manufacturers and brand gunners, not which is soft, nor which is blindly advocated. Of course, as a veteran cable fan, please understand occasionally.
Zhu Hong is a former chief evangelist for user experience at Microsoft and a technology consultant at BMW’s MINI
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First published in Zhihu column: Chinese Experience