Communication is the job of user experience designer

Guide: A good designer does not only have excellent design ability, for communication is also a lot of designers must master skills, whether it is web design or user experience, communication is the main way we communicate ideas and design ideas with customers. No matter what the design is, if the customer is rejected because of the last incomprehensible, then it will be very bad result.

For many user experience designers working in large enterprises, often feel depressed one thing is, they take a hard night to do out of the design manuscript to the product project team in other responsibilities of colleagues to look over, the result inexplicably got a bad board brick--primary school has learned to draw product manager Xiao A said, Blue doesn't look good. Customer Support Department of the "Little B" said that the right blank is very much, or put a chat room window so that users can chat here? Famous University computer professional doctor of the small C asked, why this registration button on the right side does not put on the left, so what is the scientific basis? Special Division front-end development of the Intern small D now can not help but make a speech, this translucent rounded shadow we can not do ah, you have to change the effect ...

Here you have the urge to bang the wall. At the end of the meeting, everyone went out of the room in a huff, and you don't understand why these guys are asking so many dodgy questions, and your colleagues certainly can't figure out why this stubborn guy won't listen to anyone else's advice.

Whether you're a designer in a situation above or someone else you're involved in, you're going to want this to happen less. How can design communication be smoother? How can designers make it easier to sell their ideas to other colleagues in the project team? How do other team members outside the designer express their views and opinions about the user experience more effectively?

Communication is the job of a designer

Communication and teamwork is the basic ability of a user experience designer and his job. Although many organizations have a dedicated user experience position or department in their organizational structure, the reality is that the user experience is not something of a person or department. Everyone on the product team will have an impact on the experience that the product is ultimately presented to the user. So, even if designers have brilliant ideas and designs, the value of these ideas and designs will be compromised if they are not communicated to the rest of the team and accepted.

Another feature of the user experience is that each member of the team can easily express his or her own views on the topic, because everyone is a user, can easily infer from their own use experience, "users will ...". As a result, designers may need to "tolerate" colleagues ' "gossip" more than other team members, such as developers. How to lead other colleagues to contribute constructively in the course of the discussion, and to win other team members in the user experience in this field of respect, and in this own "an acre of three points" inside to maintain a certain right, but also need designers in the continuous communication and cooperation gradually realized.

Clear this up, perhaps the work of the trouble can be a little bit less. Many designers often complain: "Colleagues have no design sense", "the design environment is not good, the boss does not understand my opinion", which instead shows that the designer's work is not done well. Conversely, if everyone has sense, if the company has a good design environment, you can play a very small role as a designer.

For other team members outside the designer, it is also possible to make the collaboration more seamless if they are more aware of each other's expertise, responsibilities, and positioning when working together. Many people still narrowly think that the user experience is responsible for drawing icons, after the product molding to do the interface decoration of the art. If you still have such a knowledge, it is difficult to expect a designer to maximize the value of the team's contribution in the process of cooperation.

ensure that consensus always exists

The design boils down to solving the problem. No matter the whole product design process is divided into several stages, different stages are actually to solve different levels, different scale problems. Other colleagues in the product team may not be familiar with the design process, and may not be aware of what is currently being addressed. As a result, designers need to make sure that they understand how the entire design process is planned, where they are going now, what issues to discuss today, what the next step is, and so on, before discussing with colleagues in different roles. Make sure that everyone is standing in the same boat to make sure that we are all in one piece.

Also, make sure that you reach a consensus at the last stage and move on from one stage to the next. Otherwise, such as to the stage of visual design suddenly found that everyone to the very bottom of the product positioning problem is not consensus, all the losses will be very heavy.

In order to ensure a targeted communication, designers in the process of different stages should also pay attention to different forms of presentation to colleagues to show their work. For example, in the early presentation of content planning, simple, rough wireframes are more likely to lead to efficient discussion and valuable feedback than high fidelity designs, and in the later stages of visual design establishment, a high-fidelity prototype is needed to simulate the real product shape as much as possible. A designer who is a beginner may feel that a design with a higher fidelity will always appear to be meticulous in its work. It's not--other colleagues may be distracted by many visual details such as button shadows, color, and so on, and you just want to show you an interactive design plan.

If your co-workers don't have much experience with the user Experience Department, it's important to take some time to explain the presentation or method you're using. I have once used a wireframe and responsible development colleagues to explain the product interaction process, I thought the other side understand the meaning of the wireframe, there is no other explanation. As a result, after the meeting, the impatient developer helter-skelter the visual style presented on the wireframe, and made the product interface directly.

To prove yourself in the right way is right.

In the process of communication, colleagues in other departments often make a lot of comments on the design. How can discussions be conducted more effectively?

First of all, because other colleagues are not professional designers, their verbal expression may not accurately reflect their true ideas, the designer first to try to find out the real meaning behind it.

Moreover, we have to guide everyone to use facts as the argument for discussion. Heard like "I think ..." Such a sentence, it often means that this is a subjective judgment--a "feel" button on the right side, B "feel" button on the left side good, these are value judgments; if there are no facts to judge, the discussion is difficult to carry on. "Facts" can have many forms of expression, for example, it can be the industry's recognized basic principles of interface design, can be a similar situation in the past, we have made decisions and the final effect of good or bad, can be the product interface design specifications in the relevant provisions, can be done prior to the usability test user feedback, Even when necessary, you can design a A/b test plan, using the data to prove whether the design has achieved the intended purpose. There is no evidence to support the decision, that is, people sitting together to clap their heads.

There is a critical view that too much emphasis on rational "evidence" such as data in design can stifle designers ' ability to solve problems creatively. Intuition and perceptual knowledge can, of course, be used to propose new solutions, but whether the solution will last, especially in a business environment, needs to be supported by a certain rational basis. Hu Shi has proposed that scholarship must be "bold hypothesis, careful verification", do user experience design.

Finally, the participants in the discussion are reminded to clarify the boundaries between themselves and the user. Although team members are also users of the product, and may even happen to be the product of the target user base, but team members and products spend more time than the average user, the knowledge of the product has long been far from the general user. In this case, their own simulation of the user's perspective to make judgments, often and the real user's idea is there is a gap. So, if you hear someone say, "Users will ...", it must be a long mind to ask whether this is true user behavior or the user who the Speaker imagines.

As a designer, you can lead a product team to conduct a user test over time, and ask your colleagues to watch them, often to see a lot of other team members surprised and open their eyes. In addition, as a designer, first of all should be open-minded to listen to the views of other colleagues-they really are not professional designers, but instead they can look at the same thing from a different angle, found that some designers can not find their own problems.

The final decision to be discussed at each meeting and the rationale for the decision must be documented in detail so that the same issue can be avoided in the future. Sometimes there are changes in the external environment, sometimes it's the change of the product team that someone will ask the same question in the future, and if we can find out the conclusions and reasons for the last time we discussed the same question, we can quickly see if the reasons for considering it are still there and whether there are new reasons to support or disagree with it. , so the efficiency of collaboration can be improved a lot.

Complementarity of thinking mode and knowledge gap

User experience designers tend to have a keen focus on detail and the feelings of others, and good at it. Whenever a new product is launched, or the old product is ready for improvement or new features are developed, we always invite colleagues from various departments including engineering, product, operations and user experience to sit together, Brainstorm meetings, hoping to get some creative ideas from the collision of people's minds. After such a meeting is much more open, there is an interesting phenomenon: designers tend to think about problems from the perspective of what "users might need", and developers tend to think about things from the perspective of what our technology might achieve.

The success of the user experience, often in the user needs, technical capabilities and business interests to achieve the balance between the three, which is why our brainstorming meeting must have the participation of members of various departments. In order to further mix the different ways of thinking, we usually ask you to pick up a few sound ideas after the initial brainstorming, and then mix the colleagues from different departments into groups to further develop and refine these ideas. Designers and developers in this process can learn from each other's thinking process, form a complementary, or even burst out a new spark.

Of course, the differences in knowledge structure can also cause obstacles to communication. For example, if a designer doesn't know what the technology behind the current product is capable of doing, the design will either be too far ahead of the technology to be fully implemented or the potential for the technology to be fully developed. For Web product designers, there is no understanding of how the Web interface works, and it is possible to make a design that is easy to draw in Photoshop but is very complex to implement on the web and does not offer many benefits.

For the non-design field of colleagues, the user experience in the field of knowledge have a certain understanding, can make you more easily with the design team of colleagues to communicate, but also to cultivate their product areas, the user to feel the sharp attention, also count icing on the cake.