“It’s 2018. I haven’t written anything about myself for almost half a year since I finished my last article. I have gained a lot in my new company and job in the past half year. The process of work is full of difficulties, but fortunately, they are always surmountable. In the past six months, WHAT I have gained is not only the works of online app, but also my understanding and perception of UI&UX constantly changed and deepened. As the Chinese New Year is coming, it’s time to summarize my work experience of the past six months and share it with everyone.”
01
Team work, compromise is an art
The final look of a product is the result of various compromises
Perhaps the biggest difference between Internet product and graphic design work is the segmentation of the work. Before doing graphic related work (brand, visual, electricity), oneself a person may be used as a basically except printing all major work, should communicate with the customer, understand user needs and ideas as well as the existing problems, and to think and formulation design, display design proposal to the customer, and approved to perform the design proposal, Ensure that the design results meet customer expectations and implementation, if the final delivery of printed matter, may follow up the printing process to ensure the quality of printed materials. Well, it’s like one person doing all the work.
But Internet product is different, the biggest problem is how to make plan first landing process, the work on the job in general there is no way (unless there is a cow to proficient in front the back-end and the client’s various development language of the cow force all the stack designers), because will involve the application development, there are some designers, even when you are ill, you can put the product interaction and UI are done, And then you have the front-end development language or the client development language, but you still need an engineer who can write the back end, so normally, the development of Internet products is interlocking and requires at least two or three people to work together. This is still a relatively small product, if it is a complex product, then each link must be subdivided, and there may be more than one person in each link, product, interaction, UI, front end, client, background, because the workload of each link is too big!
Since there are so many divisions of labor, it will inevitably lead to different jobs to see the point of the problem is not the same. For example, it is common to hear developers say, why use B when A can be used? At first, in fact, I really don’t understand, but later slowly familiar with development work, especially after I started to learn some knowledge of the code) slowly understand, actually developed in our design, the most attention is the realization of the function, the function is the set of all kinds of interaction, a page, if the interaction constant, function the same, Just change some visual style, this is relatively simple, if involved in interactive adjustment and modification, the workload may be multiplied, the so-called affect the whole body. Therefore, when we design, we should pay more attention to the consistency and reusability of modules and components, which can not only improve the quality of our design, but also effectively reduce the workload of development and improve the efficiency of development.
At the same time, the development in the implementation of the first version of the product in general a lot of time will have a variety of problems, developers in the development process, in order to improve the efficiency, do not pay too much attention to restore the details of the UI, such as how much is the spacing, the interval is a few pixels, so before the final product online can have the UI walkthrough link, In this process, it is necessary to improve the product UI implementation bit by bit that does not conform to the design draft. This is the time for us designers to focus on the so called every pixel. Before that, we should focus on the implementation of the function and flow first.
In fact, not only because of the different functions of each post will lead to many different opinions, but also because of the aesthetic or personality of each person, there will be a lot of friction. Therefore, learning to compromise and sticking to compromise is a key in team cooperation.
02
Position yourself as a product designer
Use offense as defense, and allow yourself to think about UI work from a more holistic perspective
What is the future of a UI designer? Sometimes I think about such a question, probably because I am already 30. In the past two years, I have felt a great sense of crisis. Every time I saw various young designers born in the 1990s and 1995 in non-professional classes, I envied them and felt inexplicable pressure at the same time.
In the past six months, I have shouldered most of the work of interaction design because there is no special interaction designer in my team. In the beginning, MY understanding of interaction design was very shallow. Although I read a lot of books on user experience, design psychology, interaction design and so on, I was often confused when I really started to work, because interaction design requires careful logical thinking. The standardized interaction design of common apps in the market is relatively simple because they all have reference to competing products. In my opinion, it is more difficult to design tool-based products and CMS(content management system background), especially the interaction design of CMS. If the design is not good, users will feel broken in a minute. Interaction design is a profound knowledge, and UI designers must understand and be familiar with it. It is not just a simple jump between pages, nor is it just a cool dynamic effect. It is the key to make a qualitative leap in product use experience.
If a product is compared to a person, the direction of the product itself is the person’s soul and thoughts, the interaction is the person’s behavior and cultivation, and THE UI is a person’s appearance, dress taste and overall temperament, excellent people, all three are indispensable, and the three are symbiotic relationship.
In my opinion. To be a product designer, to understand product thinking, to be familiar with interaction design, to be proficient in visual design, is the standard for future Internet designers. What is high match? I’d say at least a full stack designer. This is just like the field of graphic design. Those who do not know all kinds of printing techniques and materials are not good graphic designers. A good architect must also know a lot about architecture and building materials.
I am in this half a year’s practice, while the concept of the first product definition and prototype I did not participate in the discussion (when I went to have settled), but I still try to think about this product where is what meaning, what is target customer, solved the target user needs, what are their usage scenarios. I always think that the Internet product design work is always running through the design thinking, just different emphasis of each concrete division of Labour, you can not sorting and filtering of the product demand, but you have to understand what you are you design to meet the demand what, have goals and direction to make a better design, you don’t even know the problem, how to solve the problem. Design work, after all, is to solve the problem, do not understand the ins and outs of the problem, it can not sort out the nature of the problem, let alone make a good design to solve the problem.
Position yourself as a product designer, spend a little more time to think about products, to learn interaction, don’t let your vision stay in just draw a few beautiful interface, draw a few sets of special ICONS, or you will be eliminated by the industry sooner or later, no, it is eliminated by other better designers, well, I don’t want to be eliminated.
03
Remember UCD, but don’t be naive
A lot of companies don’t really care about what’s called UCD
I believe that most designers still work in small and medium-sized enterprises. The design work of such enterprises has a very obvious feature, which is to meet the preference of the supervisor or the boss as the first goal. All design schemes will be based on the preference of the boss. Of course, so is our company. After all, we are also a small company, and the boss has a very strong personal style. So when I made the first app, there were more than seven or eight versions of the visual scheme of the first screen. Into the deeper into the design of other pages link, we don’t have to do what the user scenario analysis or the user demand analysis work, such as some of the ideas are in accordance with my boss to the realization of the step by step, of course, this is not a must be wrong, but most of the current situation of the company’s design work, it might even have a good product, just less likely. Many company has a professional design team, also does not have the professional product managers, more is not very professional product designers, do a lot of time basically all design decisions were taken by the head, or rely on personal life or design experience, in imperceptible in, the design method of the UCD left behind, the UI designer is responsible for mechanical beautification under each element, Do a visual style of unity, become a true interface beautifier.
But we UI designers not only beautify the following interface, although we may not have a professional design team, not a bad product manager or interaction designers, but we also want to constantly remind myself that, in the process of design for the center with the user experience, user in the interface need is what, what information is most important for him, How to design can reduce the user’s browsing burden, improve the user’s efficiency, although we may think about the direction and the result is not necessarily right, but as long as we think about it, we can continue to strengthen our own design thinking, avoid their own output of stereotyped design scheme, improve their design ability. If you give 120 percent of everything you do, you can grow into a design powerhouse, even if you’re in a small company.
04
Insist on learning, and constantly improve aesthetic and vision
It’s okay if it’s not good now, but if it’s not good all the time, there’s something really wrong with you
I used to envy designers who were young enough to join a big company, or work before they were 20 years old. As for me, I have graduated from university for 7 years, and I have only been working on design for more than 3 years. It seems that I have been left behind before I even start running.
It may seem like it’s bad, but it’s not. All the hard things you go through, if you survive them, are a great asset in your life. So how do you do that? Can only constantly strive to narrow the gap with others, no, not the gap with others, and their expectations of their own gap.
Then improving aesthetic appreciation and vision is the most basic thing to do, and I also believe that this is the most basic ability that a designer needs to continuously improve. Aesthetic appreciation and vision improvement is the need to accumulate over a long period of time, software operations and techniques can be a short period of time to learn, but also temporary steal teacher, but if you aesthetic is not good, you will never be able to make a good design, because in your eyes and in the eyes of high-level designers of high level of senior, may be different days. Aesthetics and vision are like hidden attributes of a designer that come unnaturally into your daily design. You don’t need to use it, it will naturally help you in your work.
But a lot of designers don’t take this seriously. In fact, as long as you keep watching excellent works every day, insist on a few months or half a year, your aesthetic will certainly have a qualitative leap. What you thought was great in the past may seem like a sneer in the future.
Looking at works is actually very simple. You just need to open behance every day, open the 10 works recommended on the home page, and spend more than 20 minutes looking at them carefully. If you feel good about them, you can sort them out and save them for future reference.
But the key is persistence.
05
Pick up English and don’t let yourself be a frog in a well
Don’t always look at the domestic design website, the outside world is more wonderful
Why relearn English? (I just wanted to make it to the international stage in case I ever did. Yeah, that could happen.)
In the beginning, I decided to regain the opportunity to speak English, thanks to the translation team organized by Sister Sha. I just want to see if I can pick up my English again. Therefore, I set a goal for myself from February, 2017, to turn over an English design article every month, and I was glad that I stuck to it. In a number of problems in the work at the same time, will force me to see some foreign language information, make me feel I must be harder to pick up English, and in recent months also began to memorizing words, the design of the article to read English every day, compared to the beginning, feel is very fruitful, see the article faster and faster, You also get better at reading (as opposed to when you’re bad).
Gradually, I feel that learning English well is very helpful for the long-term development of a designer.
If you want to know the idea of more excellent designers in the world, learn their experiences, then to get first-hand information in person, rather than waiting for the translation of others, and a lot of excellent teaching material in the field of all kinds of design and materials are only English version, if you don’t learn English well, their learning is not only a lot of second-hand information, Not even a chance to learn. To learn English well is to open the key to a wider field for yourself. Your vision determines the limit of your achievements.
06
Touch the code and discover a new world
Learning is never easy
Have those of you who make interfaces ever come across a situation like this: I designed it like this, but why did it become like that after I developed it?
Well, that’s how I decided I wanted to learn code. I thought, why can’t I just learn the code and implement my own design? Isn’t that cool? I also had the idea of learning front-end technology on and off, so I decided to learn.
So, I went into this huge pit! How difficult! …………………)
In order to develop personal websites for myself, I chose the front-end development language as my learning content. My main focus so far is Javascript (HTML and CSS are pretty much covered).
It was really painful at the beginning of learning, but after one or two months of painful suffering, I gradually found the fun of learning code, but at the same time, I found that the pit was getting bigger and bigger, and I felt that I had to learn much more than I expected. Although the process is difficult and painful (and I suspect it will continue to be painful for a long time), the process of learning code really helps to improve a designer’s logical thinking, because programming thinking is more logical than design thinking (and design work is very logical). At the same time, more knowledge of programming (programming development languages are many, but the way of thinking is similar) for understanding the work of developers and work, will also be a great help. The designers of the Internet, I think in the spare capacity, should be more or less to learn some knowledge of the code, because it is one of the important link in product development, you don’t need to be good at it, but some understand, can make you better, and communicate effectively, developers enemy and know yourself, and reduce the quarrel. However, it is not recommended for students with less design experience to learn code, after all, it takes a lot of time to learn, do not become a half bucket of water, in the design work does not affect the spare time to let yourself try, maybe you will like programming this thing.
I hope I can write an article related to design every month, so that I can grow up and get to know more designers who are making continuous efforts in design.
