I have never known how to learn it some time ago. I found a good article on the Internet and shared it with the product manager on the road.

 

If you are also an interactive designer, do you often feel like you don't know where to start, after reading a lot of books, learning a lot of software, and drawing a lot of pictures, I still feel uneasy and afraid of my shortcomings, I wish to have an interactive design learning outline. There are two reasons for this problem. One is that the interaction designer has no strong visibility. The interaction designer's product is generally a line chart, flow chart, Information Architecture diagram, and description document, however, these things are not as elegant as visual design drafts, nor as elegant and cool as program code. In the eyes of outsiders, the design of junior Interaction designers and senior Interaction designers is similar, I can't tell you how many layers of skill you have developed. The second reason is that interactive design is an interdisciplinary major and requires too much learning. Today, this great God says that you want to learn PS well, tomorrow, the great God will say that he wants to learn the program, and the day after tomorrow, the God will say that he wants to learn psychology, blablabla... If the information is too large or too messy, this situation will be overwhelmed.

Today, I made a "knowledge architecture diagram of Interaction designers", as shown in, which sorts out the knowledge reserves required by Interaction designers, they are arranged according to the general process of interaction design, from requirement analysis, to information architecture, process design, to prototype design, to availability testing. With this logic, we will introduce the knowledge involved in each step and turn it to zero. In this way, kids shoes can take a one-by-one approach to learn interactive design step by step, next, I will also recommend articles or books involved in the corresponding links for you. After you have mastered them all, I believe there will be no more sense of sureness.

 

 

Knowledge architecture of Interaction designers

Okay. Let's start to explain this picture.

Requirement Analysis

Generally, the first step of interaction design is requirement analysis. Requirement analysis mainly refers to user research, scenario scripts, role creation, and requirement extraction.

First, user research methods include user interviews, surveys, observations, and focal points interviews.

Secondly, creating character roles and scenario scripts will help the design team always design around the user's goals and ensure that your design is user-centered. Of course, the character roles and scenario scripts are not just imagined, it is extracted based on comprehensive user research.

The above two pieces of knowledge are described in detail in the book "about face 3: essence of Interactive Design". You must read and understand this book.

Finally, I personally prefer to analyze and refine the demand from the perspectives of "People, system, and environment". However, note that, these three aspects can be seen as a formula. You must learn how to use them flexibly. Different terms are used for different tasks and objects, such as for a physical product, this formula becomes "people, things, scenarios", and "people, goals, and scenarios" for a task. You can refer to "Product School: omnipotent Product Planning formula" for requirement extraction. There are also various demand analysis methods on the Internet. If you are proficient in one, the most important thing is to have a set of principles and procedures, and then continue to use the methods they have summarized to practice.

Information Architecture and Process Design

This piece of knowledge needs to be mastered: the drawing of flowcharts and Information Architecture diagrams, psychology, and logic.

The flowchart and Information Architecture diagram are tools used to express the overall logical path of the Interaction Design. A good flowchart or information architecture diagram is helpful for team communication and thinking. There are a lot of relevant learning materials on the Internet, but the online articles are usually not systematic and rigorous, so I will recommend two books for you: efficient communication design path and Interactive Design Guide.

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is an important method in process design. In simple terms, task analysis is a structured decomposition of a task, sort the situations and actions required by the user to complete the task. The advantage of this analysis is that you can further understand how users use products and interact with products and environments to ensure the strict logic of design, in the end, your interaction process is more efficient and user-friendly. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) can be used to learn more about it in this article. However, I don't think this article is very rigorous and detailed, in the future, I may use an article to introduce this method separately.

Psychology and logic can be said to be the most important internal work of Interaction designers. They seem very tall and may have no way to start, but do not escape or blindly learn it. Instead, they must carry out systematic and gradual learning. For example, in psychology, you can study color psychology, design psychology, cognitive psychology, and behavioral psychology in sequence. The interaction designer is human-centered, pondering human cognition and memory psychology is crucial to improving the quality of your design. The recommended books include Donald Norman's design psychology, Accenture's cognitive psychology, the students can also take a look at my previous article: Interactive Design and psychology; logic seems to be more illusory, and may even feel like I cannot go back to the sky, actually, no. A person's logical thinking is exercised the day after tomorrow. For Improvement of logical thinking, refer to zhihu's answer: zhihu: how can we improve the logic thinking ability? For more information about books, see here: what books or materials can be recommended to improve the logic thinking ability?

Prototype Design

Prototype design is one of the most important tasks of Interaction designers and the best practice of Interaction designers. Therefore, a large amount of knowledge needs to be stored here, for example, Interactive Paradigm, design principles, platform specifications, typographical layout, and sketch painting.

The interaction paradigm refers to the interaction mode (reference) and interaction elements (such as operations, windows, controls, menus, and dialogs. These are basic skills. Many students have learned something about self-confidence. However, during the interview, they will answer questions about the types and differences of controls. This is the consequence of no system learning.

 

 

Interaction Mode

The design principle refers to the interaction design principle. This is too much. It can be said that there are countless numbers, and everyone has different versions. If you are a beginner and there is no special solution, we recommend that you first put "about face 3: the essence of interactive design is thoroughly understood. In other words, the knowledge on the internet is fragmented, reading thousands of words written by the gods will consume your patience and increase your memory load. In the end, it is still not comprehensive enough. Therefore, we should thoroughly read authoritative books.

Platform specifications. From the terminal perspective, the platform can be divided into PCs, mobile phones, tablets, etc. From the system perspective, it can be divided into windows, Mac, IOS, Windows Phone, Android, etc, each platform has corresponding design specifications. If you want to be an interactive designer, you must first master them. In addition, these specifications are generally in English, and the latest Chinese translation is generally hard to find, moreover, translation by netizens may be at varying risk,Therefore, you must learn English well. This is also very important!

Typographical and sketch painting. Interactive designers trained by professional typographical skills have great advantages, because typographical design requires not only aesthetic experience, but also a solid visual theoretical foundation, logical thinking, and even psychological theory, typographical layout is also an interactive design that visually interacts with readers and works. In addition, sketch painting is a plus item. A beautiful sketch will make the team communicate more efficiently. However, the sketch here is not a sketch, but not a sketch of an item, it is a simple stroke. Bill vilanke, a famous interaction designer, has an amazing performance in graphics and hand-drawn sketches. He can talk at the same time, you can use hand-drawn methods to outline the sketch to illustrate your point of view at any time. This is what I saw when I was reading introduction to interactive design. At that time, I was lost. This skill was awesome! So I also went to learn simple strokes, but the learning is intermittent, so far it is still a force of food.

 

 

Sketch drawn by Bill viprank

Availability test. We recommend that you read the "availability project" book first, but this book may seem a little difficult due to translation reasons. You can read Netease uedc's article first to learn about it: simple and Fast availability test.

Of course, the theory is not enough after all. After learning the theory, we need to carry out a lot of practices to consolidate it, And then summarize our own set of processes and methods.

Visual design and program design

Basic Points are both a plus points and a basic skill. It doesn't mean that you must learn visual and code well, but it will be of great benefit to you. For example, it is helpful to communicate with other people in the team and to choose a more reasonable and realistic interaction solution. I suggest you learn software such as PS, AI, axure, PPT, and AE. If you have time, you can learn C speech/Java, HTML + CSS + JavaScript again.

Last and most importantly

This article is only a summary of the knowledge architecture. Although many books and articles are recommended for beginners,However, reading these books and articles alone is definitely not enough, and a lot of practices and experiences are required,Unlike learning a software, interactive design can greatly improve in the short term and requires long-term accumulation. In normal times, we should always look at others' excellent designs to experience various apps, websites, and platforms, we need to accumulate a large amount of materials, constantly sum up experience, and apply experience to practical use. If this article can help you a little bit, I am also very pleased.