In the team’s daily design Review, I often say that “if the product is not well planned, our design will be useless to make flowers”.
Designers often start to talk about the design process and page as soon as they get the design draft, and try their best to meet the needs of the product manager (hereinafter referred to as PD). The page looks good, but when it goes live, it doesn’t work, and sometimes it’s counterproductive. Did a long time thankless, and finally fell a design ability is not good evaluation.
In fact, designers who can be recruited into the company must be able to meet the requirements. Some designers see techniques as the only way to make a living, while others see techniques as a professional ability to use methods and processes to solve problems.
What is the designer’s workflow?
In most projects, PD first plans the business requirements, and then draws a simple wireframes for the designer to carry out the specific design. After receiving the requirements document, many designers will follow PD’s flow chart to refine the interaction design and visual design and hand it in.
Whether you want to admit it or not, this is the reality of many corporate design teams. Some companies have strong PD ability, even if there are not too many designers “processing” things will not be too bad. However, for some teams with weak PD, if the designer fails to take another step, the final product is often unsatisfactory. So the delicate combination of PD and designer ends up with either PD “eating” the designer, or PD “living in peace” with the designer.
Don’t designers eat PD, you ask? Yes, of course, but not much. The vast majority of cases are the two mentioned above.
“Eat” may be the wrong word, but the point I’m trying to make is this wave of designers who think about products and solve problems from a more holistic perspective. Know how to reverse drive and improve the overall design quality through the optimization design of the whole product process. That is the meaning of the title of my article today.
Where are all the designers who can eat PD?
I have many friends who have been engaged in the design industry for a long time and have accumulated enough experience to gradually turn to management. I spent more time in business seminars and less time doing my own design. So people just said that this man is very good, but all day long meetings, and no work.
It’s not that they didn’t do something. Instead, they did something more important. In these endless business meetings, they try to do the “bigger user experience” in the early stages of business planning, to kill off some crazy ideas in advance, and to make the big process more rational. Otherwise, believe me, your work will be much more painful.
How do you become a PD eating designer?
I would like to talk about a PD of our company first. In my opinion, there are two crucial factors for his success: first, he has a deep understanding of business logic; The second is a nose for data. Both are easy to say, but far from easy to do. When people talk about their needs when information is not equal, it’s easy to be at a disadvantage.
In order to become a PD eating designer, the following conveniences need to be paid attention to:
0. Listen and watch before you shoot
One of the favorite things a designer can do when he’s new to a business is play with the product and write a plan for improvement. Many years ago, there was a designer who made a share to PD and UED after he joined the company, and found a lot of problems for the website, which probably meant that you guys eat shit, so many problems did not change. As a result, I failed to do anything for a year and returned to my original company in disgrace.
You should know that everyone around you is not a fool. It is not unknown that there are problems with products, but the reality is that many things change slowly due to priorities, resources and other problems, and the bigger the company, the more this happens. You can’t do anything well without the support of other teams. So when taking on a new business, be sure to listen more than talk.
1. Adequate understanding of business and data
This is the basic condition of “equal dialogue”, and no designer dare to take over a complex business immediately to make drastic changes. If so, he must be blowing NB. Even as a designer, never lose business and data, which is a valid measure of your future success.
2. Build trust
The reality is that all PD are burdened with heavy KPI indicators, and any design that does not help solve THE KPI problem is nonsense. Only when you solve some product problems and improve data through your design, PD will truly recognize you, understand your design ideas and try your proposed scheme.
3. Be a designer, not an artist
For commercial companies, design teams are more important to solve business problems and improve numbers than to show their artistic feelings. Some of the product teams in some companies are so sick of it that the company can’t even survive what are you showing all that affection for? Your design will continue to benefit the company and everyone will believe what you say and feel right about what you do. On the other hand… You’re just a tool. Who else cares about you?
Why is wireless application design important
Finally, let’s talk about wireless application design. Many foreign teams and many domestic entrepreneurial teams do not have the role of PD. They are usually product designers and visual designers. Product designers are responsible for the commercial part of products and interaction design. But the situation of the two is still somewhat different, because some designers abroad are very strong, can more comprehensive coverage of the overall product design work, and most of the domestic because there are not so many people…
For wireless products, I strongly endorse the role of product designer rather than PD + designer. Due to the screen size limitations of mobile based products, getting the experience right is often a matter of flow design. In this way, the overlap area between PD and designer will be larger, and it will cost more to divide the work into two roles, and the effect may not be good.
The wireless team I worked on spent more than a year working with the product team to figure out the best way to collaborate. After more than a year of efforts also won the trust of many product departments, finally we reached an agreement. PD will pay more attention to the commercial part, coordinate development resources and version management, while we designers are responsible for the design of the whole product.
I have paid close attention to the changes over the past year. In terms of efficiency and effect, our whole product has been significantly improved compared with a year ago. I can’t say we did a good job as a team, but at least we focused on solving business problems and were “on the same page” with the product team, which earned people’s trust and trusted us with the entire product design.
Photo from Web Design Blog
In fact, this is also a test article of another design subscription column of Pinapps. I would like to share my understanding and feelings about design with you based on my design experience of more than ten years. Not always, but at least it should be harmless. I welcome your feedback.
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