Productivity is a platitude, but for many new employees, it can’t be avoided.
Most of the work of product and design staff is creative and requires a lot of thought and research. It is very time consuming, and sometimes it is easy to waste time if you don’t master some methods and essentials. It’s often the case that it’s the end of the day and you still have a lot of work to do. It’s easy to get into debt every day by asking for extra work or putting it off until tomorrow.
Products and design are at the upper end of the r&d process, and sometimes design time is automatically compressed to meet deadlines. Especially at startups, product managers and designers aren’t always well-staffed. It’s common for designers to have multiple design assignments at the same time, and there’s a lot of confusion about how they can manage so much work in so little time.
Here I highlight my systematic summary in this area, which I share with our UED department:
Five ways to improve design efficiency
1. Establish exclusive tool kit, fast and efficient use of tools
As the saying goes, “To do a good job, you must first sharpen your tools.” Designers who want to increase their productivity start by building their own toolkits based on their own workflows and scenarios. I usually show the tools we use the most in the requirements analysis stage/design inspiration stage/user experience design stage/collaborative office tools/walk-through acceptance stage.
In the demand analysis and design research stage, need: mind mapping tools/questionnaire tools/data analysis tools and document tools;
Common tools in the early research stage
In the stage of design inspiration and material collection, we need to focus on websites: including some comprehensive design websites, and we can also collect materials by category, and we can also have some inspiration collection tools. Remember, for frequently visited sites to collect management in the computer browser, easy to browse and quick search. Don’t open baidu every time you want to open a website. At the worst, create the habit of typing url searches from the address bar.
Commonly used design inspiration collection site
User experience design stage needs: interactive prototype tools/visual design tools/dynamic design tools and cutting map annotation tools;
Common tools used in the interaction and UI design phases
Cross-department collaboration and project management Collaborative office tools mainly include project management software, work communication tools, cloud space and meeting management tools. Some project management tools are also requirements or task management tools.
Common tools for team work
Bug management tools are needed during the design walkthrough and acceptance phases.
Common bug management software
Selection tools, home page selection is a sharp weapon. The tools are:
The first is stable performance, no bugs or functional defects. For example, one of the biggest reasons I don’t use Evernote right now is that the free version is too emasculated and storing articles with graphics is extremely slow.
In addition, the experience must be good, to better serve their work, effectively improve efficiency. Don’t be a burden to yourself, many times installing a system wastes a day.
Moreover, as a designer engaged in creative work, it would be even better if the tool itself could play a role in inspiration and stimulation. For example, if you ask me to choose between A Windows product and a Mac operating system, I have no hesitation in suggesting that you choose the latter. The same goes for mobile phones. An iPhone is a must, but it doesn’t have to be a fringe X. The best design in the industry is apple products. For example, iPad positioning is the productivity of the artist. Even now many designers will bring iPad to show their work in the interview, which is good.
Make sure you use more tools. Practice makes perfect. Not only do you need to maintain and manage tools, but you also need to master the skills and shortcuts to use tools efficiently.
1. Master the shortcut keys of core design software. For example: Xmind shortcut keys, the most used is enter to insert a theme, TAB to insert a subtheme. Axure shortcut keys the most commonly used shortcut f5 generation; PS is not easy to get started, but also need to comb and master the shortcut keys to improve efficiency.
2. Proficient in using templates that fit the business/product to achieve reusable/multi-reuse. In Axure’s case, interaction designers need to understand which components or modules will be used on other pages, so they can create templates and drag them from one page to the next. They don’t need to redraw the page for each feature. The same is true for UI designers. Create groups to manage layers and reuse them.
3. Build a dedicated product component library. Deposit some of the most commonly used Spaces or templates to build a component library for a certain product, which can be taken at will and shared with colleagues for common use, which can greatly improve team efficiency. The component library at this point is an early outgrowth of the design specification.
4. Multi-screen collaboration. Designers often need to cut multiple pages when doing design. At this time, if there are two or more screens to achieve multi-screen collaboration, efficiency can be greatly improved. Such as working with two computer screens, or one computer connected to multiple phone screens.
It is important to note that some collaborative office tools, especially project management software, are best used company-wide or on an entire project team. Therefore, some tools should first seek the opinion of the leader, the leader’s approval, it is easier to implement from the top down.
In addition, we should use more cloud tools, which are not only convenient for collaboration, but also can view or use fragmented time to deal with some tasks anytime and anywhere.
Establish design and work specifications
Design specifications are guidelines for product design on the one hand and important tools for consistency and efficiency in collaborative design on the other. Many design teams are not one person fighting, from a small design team of three or two people to a large design department of hundreds of people. At this time, it is necessary to have a set of design norms that everyone follows.
Design specifications include:
1. Platform specifications, such as iOS/Android specifications.
IOS Design Specification
2. Product design specifications.
airbnb guideline
Design specifications, ranging from font/size, icon, button, color, etc., to text spacing, navigation Settings, page structure, page layout, etc. Once designers have a clear idea of the standard, they can get started without thinking and become more efficient.
In addition to guiding design and ensuring consistency, product design specifications can be used for new training, enabling new people to quickly establish a knowledge of the product, and quickly get involved in the work through familiarity with the design specifications.
In addition, you should also pay attention to your own folder naming standards, layer/directory management standards, cutting map labeling standards, etc. In many cases, it is necessary to reach a consensus within the team and be able to clearly understand upstream and downstream at the same time.
By unifying designers’ thoughts and actions through norms, and fighting like a single person, communication costs and collaboration difficulties will be greatly reduced, and efficiency will be greatly improved. At the beginning, PayPal did not recruit top talents, but those who were more compatible with their thoughts and actions, in order to implement actions more efficiently and consistently.
Do a good job in task and time management
Designers are often in a multitasking state. The first thing to do at this time is to prioritize tasks. I usually arrange in quadrants of importance and urgency, mark locations and list priorities.
Prioritize in order of importance and urgency
As shown in the figure, we usually work on tasks in a B-C-E-A-D sequence, prioritize them in the project management software, and then execute them. Conventional such practice has no problem, in the face of urgent things, the enemy will block, muddle through.
However, we should establish a mechanism to gradually guide the important and urgent matters to the priority rather than the urgent through planning and prediction in advance, so that we can have enough energy to face things calmly and efficiently, and not always be led by the nose by unexpected events.
During the implementation process, there are several time management lessons to be shared as follows:
1. Cycle your plans and goals. Make sure you know what specific tasks you will be doing in the coming week. Make a weekly plan and arrange your tasks for each day. Then make a daily plan for each day, and arrange what tasks to complete in the morning/noon and afternoon.
Don’t write any plan in general. Make sure it’s specific and you know exactly what you’re going to do next. The plan must be reasonable and follow specific executable and quantifiable principles.
In addition, you can combine your plan with rewards and punishments to motivate yourself to meet your goals on time.
2. Beat procrastination by breaking down tasks. From the perspective of cognitive psychology, procrastination often occurs in people’s mind because the tasks they are exposed to are complicated or uncertain. At this time, people will have psychological burden and are unwilling to face it.
When faced with this kind of problem, we need to break down the tasks into small modules to defeat one by one. Build confidence little by little and win the whole thing.
3. When faced with complex tasks, be sure to leave large blocks of time for yourself and be good at refusing interruptions. This is because there is a direct cost of switching between multiple tasks at the same time, just as when we browse the web, looking at one thing and another, only to find that we have not finished any of them for a long time.
Work must grasp the key points, as far as possible first bite “hard bones”. Concentrate and don’t let others easily interrupt you. Also should notice classification, batch processing thing additionally, same kind of business, can be handled centrally.
In addition, get rid of the temptations and distractions of social networking and create a good environment for yourself to be more immersed in completing tasks and achieving goals.
4. Make a good routine — go to bed early and wake up early. In this way, you can open up a time gap with many people. In this way, you will find that the day will not only be much longer, but also there will not be so many people competing with you wherever you go. There will be no crowded subway, no queue for eating, and working at the wrong peak will make you happy all day long.
5. Be results-oriented. Leaders judge employees by results, and employees should be results-oriented when it comes to tasks.
I read an article before, you need to make a powerpoint presentation for your boss, but now you only have two hours, you don’t even have some data analysis, what should you do?
If you are not results-oriented, you will allocate your time and energy equally. You can also get stuck in a spot where you can’t get out of it, take time and leave the rest of it undone.
For example, if you want to do a data analysis, but you realize you don’t have the data, you have to search for the data immediately, you spend a lot of time when the data is available, you have to use a tool to generate graphs and analyze them, and then you realize that you don’t know how to use the analysis tool, and then you go to the online tutorial. There’s a good chance you’ll get caught up in something else that you can’t get back to. You can’t get that report done in two hours, let alone two days.
The right thing to do is to be results-oriented and make deadlines clear. This is the time to break down and frame tasks, identify priorities and core values, and then fill in and improve them differently to achieve your goals. When it comes to writing a report for your boss, you need to evaluate the value and weight of the data piece in your overall report. Many times when you are done, you will find that the previous worries and anxieties are unnecessary.
4. Streamline your design process
What is the most effective thing a designer can do?
It must have been a censored draft.
Therefore, if you want to fundamentally improve the design efficiency, you need to master a set of effective design methods and gradually streamline your design.
1. Proactively communicate and clarify requirements. After getting the demand, we should actively communicate, understand the background of the demand and the purpose of the product, and grasp the key points and purposes of the demand.
2. Be sure to go deep into the project. Only by understanding the business and immersing yourself in the context of the project, can you grasp the key to the problem when designing, provide more feasible solutions in time, and reduce modification and repetition.
Some of the designers I know on UED teams are very detached from the project, they are very comfortable within their own design team, they do things that are floating around, they don’t solve real problems, so the solution is required to change over and over again.
3. Do some preliminary design and research work. After mature designers, to demand not just open the computer started to design, but specific usage scenarios for users and have a certain understanding and the control, do some competing goods analysis, gradually knew their design ideas, to draw sketch, to find their own direction, think think about, and then use graphics software to design. In this way, users and products can be taken into account to improve the success rate of the scheme.
4. Designers can do some simple usability tests after completing their first draft of design. Sometimes if you go straight from a project to a review, you’ll get asked a lot of questions you wouldn’t expect. In order to avoid being criticized and pass the review all at once, take the time to find a few people in the company who you think are closest to the users and don’t know your design, and let them experience your design and see if there are any problems. Take notes so that they can be modified later.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you’re unsure about whether it’s usability or technical feasibility. Don’t do it alone.
5. In the process of design follow-up, if there is a problem that you do not understand or cannot move, on the one hand, you should find out the key and boundary of the problem and seek the correct countermeasures. In addition, be sure to find the right person in the key position, starting from him, to seek a breakthrough. Or the strength of leadership to promote, learn to borrow force.
6. In the design and acceptance process, we must establish our own check list to ensure that the check is complete. It’s best to approach this from two perspectives: first, experience the newly developed feature from the user’s point of view. Why? Since it’s been a while since you designed it, it’s easy to be a user rather than a designer, and you’ll be more likely to find problems with your experience, rather than rushing through a prototype.
Then according to your interaction prototype or design draft, carefully on the implementation of a development effect, a comparison is easy to find problems.
Matched with their own go check list, not only get twice the result with half the effort, and can make a lot of extreme situations will appear no place to hide.
7. After the launch of the product, make a project summary and review. These conclusions are of great benefit to subsequent iterations of the product and to guide our own design work. These summaries gradually accumulate and form their own experience and methodology.
Process of design
In short, join the research link in the early stage, and do some analysis and summary in the later stage. Once established, the process-based working way of individuals can be used for life.
5. Good at deep thinking, pay attention to knowledge management and application of learning
Of course, in the long run, in order to achieve efficient working mode, in addition to the establishment of good habits and workflow, also need to deeply practice internal skills, thinking and knowledge management and application efforts.
Deep thinking is more important than hard work. You will find a problem: in many cases, for some web articles or fragmented knowledge, it seems that you have read it once and think you understand it, but when you really use it, you find that you do not master it. Why is that? Because we are in the age of information explosion, a lot of information is like a quick look, and has not really internalized their knowledge.
Therefore, we should learn to select valuable information through our own thinking and pay attention to this part of information and knowledge management. For example, I will think of their good public articles, directly add to the cloud notes. Then I would regularly reread these articles, make my own notes and annotations, and organize them according to my knowledge structure.
The purpose of repeated reading is to better understand and digest the knowledge. The advantage of writing notes or analyzing them is to add your own reflection and stamp. Through association analysis and deep thinking, I want to interpret and annotate the information in my own language and gradually transform it into my own knowledge.
Gradually add the external knowledge to your system through thinking/review and knowledge categorization. On this basis, there is a purpose to apply what has been learned in the project. Only by applying this knowledge does it truly belong to you.
If you follow the same learning path of reading, thinking, taking notes, managing your knowledge, and applying your knowledge, you will find that you are on a fast track to accumulating knowledge and improving your ability. The more you do, the more efficient and professional you become.
conclusion
Steve Jobs once said: you make your habits before 30, and your habits make you after 30.
In the first two years of work, the most important thing for product designers is to develop a good way of thinking and working habits, which is commonly referred to as professionalism. To be productive, focus on tool use, specifications, time and task management, design processes and methods, and knowledge management and application.
Many people believe that whether a new employee makes rapid progress depends not only on his or her own talents and company projects, but also on the mentor he or she follows. The main reason a mentor is important is that you can learn how a mentor works and thinks.
Learn, and then better than blue.
Welcome to identify the QR code, pay attention to “Foreign language”.
