Design is productivity: making it easier for users to find information

　

 

　　Design is productivity

MENG HONG

Recently, zhihu launched an online round-table forum on design as productivity. This online discussion is far from a simple demonstration of the aforementioned proposition. The scope of the topic covers from the individual cultivation of designers to the integration of design and technology trends. In fact, the content shared by designers is beyond the expectation.

The following text is selected from the discussion:

　　New technology trends and Design

Interaction Design is inseparable from the development and changes of hardware and software. What is the direction of technology? Baidu Shanghai mobile Internet user experience manager MoonMonster summarized 13 potential trends, including intelligent private goods, changes in Smart Home Appliances, war of set-top boxes, voice, body feeling, and social syndrome. He said:

If you try to draw a circle, the center is people, the nearest and most core circle is private devices, and the outer circle is PCs and household appliances, so if a company can occupy the core position in the private goods circle, it will also bring amazing market and opportunities to it.

"Man is the scale of everything in the world" -- protigora. The design was born from the beginning of the use of tools by humans. With the development of human civilization, tools have undergone tremendous changes over the past few years, modern people who operate on computers and primitive people who originally used stone axes have almost no changes in their physiological characteristics, including hands, five senses, and brains ...... The nature of the design has not changed, and the design can still be measured based on people.

Ma Li, the founder of Bri Design, started from the perspective of classic Design ideas such as "less is more" and "Form follows the function" and combined with the evolution of technology trend prediction Design:

Most of the time, the design is like a game with users. You guess, you're lucky. Users' cognitive costs are high. Now and in the future, the interface design is working hard to reduce users' cognitive costs, flattening the information architecture, and making it easier for users to find information. Different user scenarios (for example, browsing with no specific purpose or locating or searching with a specific purpose) require better support.

From the perspective of Information Architecture and interaction process, no matter how the trend changes in the future, the cognitive cost is continuously reduced, the information content carried by the interface is displayed directly and conveniently in front of the user. This implementation can also become Flat Design.

The interface design should not take the user's attention too much. Just like the architecture designed by Louis sulf, it can be reduced to no more streamlined. Any interface element must be used as a function, it must exist. Simplicity and cleanliness will remain the mainstream in the future.

The design trend is a wave of waves, and the final result is Aesthetic Fatigue. The aesthetic utility gradually decreases, just as the marginal utility in economics declines until the next trend appears. I once joked that: "A long term must be convex, a long term must be equal, a long term must be square, and a long term must be round ......".

The emergence of new technologies and new products, such as Google Glass and Leap Motion, are constantly promoting the feasibility of interaction. Although there is not yet any device or technology that can truly generate an epoch-making interaction like the invention of the mouse, we can see that the lightweight and sensitive interaction methods continue to bloom.

　　Self-cultivation by designers

So how should a good interaction designer grow? Zhu Yin, founder of Rigo Design, shared a model that he often discussed with designers: 10% + 20% + 70%.

10% of the growth of designers: participate in meaningful industry summits, participate in professional exchanges or training between meaningful industries, focus on industry trends and new knowledge, and expand the professional horizon. At this layer, we will improve the performance of our designers by about 10%;

20% of the growth of designers: Design mentor and mentor, there will always be a short board or a lack of knowledge structure in your design path. At this time, I am looking for a good mentor, and I am also a mentor. When you encounter a professional bottleneck, platform, or creative vacuum period, I will give you guidance on the way forward, or share my experiences, it is a treasure gift from your career. At this level, a designer can be promoted by about 20%;

70% of the growth of designers: daily work. In daily seemingly ordinary work, from the confusion of every problem to the process of solving every difficulty, from the process of every thought to the polishing of every round of team collaboration and design iteration. The lessons learned from every day's work fail successfully, which is the biggest improvement for designers by 70%. It is also called: Listening to thunder without sound.

Clarify what your goals are, understand what your strengths are, and focus and stick to the rest. There is a good saying: persistence is a long process, but fortunately, we are not in a hurry.

The horsepower mentioned above also shares some of my ideas, such:

If you simply divide the skills involved in the user experience field into: user research, product (concept/function) design, interaction design, visual design, engineering technology, I think any interaction designer, visual designer, and so on should have a composite overall skill, but the question of which part is more and which part is less.

If you have more enthusiasm, you might as well act immediately.

Become Geek. Interaction designers themselves need to be super users, which means that they need a large number of crazy products in related fields to immerse themselves in products.

Exceeds the user and returns to the user. After mastering a large amount of information, you must be able to return to the user's perspective. Interaction designers never represent themselves, but users. They need to transform themselves into users at any time and switch dynamically.

The interaction designer needs to cooperate with different roles in the team and cooperate with other team members. A simple design may mean that the development engineer has to work overtime for a long time. So the question is, is this a good design? Is there any alternative design that can make the project investment the most cost-effective?

Find a good project and a good team. I don't have a good chance, and I can't try again. These projects should be the space for Interaction designers to make full use. A good team must pay attention to the role of interactive design.