Facebook Product Design Director: A question about the principles of design

This article was compiled from 〈a Matter of principle〉, author of Facebook product design director Julie Zhuo.
Julie stressed in the article, designers make every design decision behind, should have to have this, it is best to have to stand the test of the principle of support, and these principles can be scaled, so that other members of the team can understand, do not have to spend huge communication costs.

There are 1000 decisions behind each design.

What is the main screen of the app? How do you navigate between different options? What color is best for Top bar?

A good designer has a logical explanation behind every design decision.

There should be no random decision, after all, a good design is characterized by "intentional."

The app's main screen is an overview of the message arrangement, because this is what most users want to see when they start the app.

Our app has four main images, so using tab bar will make the four main images easily discoverable.

Top Bar is white because we don't want it to be too much of a play.

A good designer will make you feel like you can ask any of her decisions, the reasons behind them, and she must be able to give you a clear answer.

In practice, however, this is hard to scale. If you really take the time to get to know the designers ' 1000 decisions, even if only a small part of it, I'm afraid that the end will be over.

And that's where the difference between a good designer and a great designer is.

You see, a great designer will start with "why". She understands the principles behind her thinking and gives you a sense of the core values behind all of her design decision-making processes.

Principle (noun): a fundamental truth that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or a chain of reasoning.

Principle (noun): can be used as a basic truth of belief system or logical chain.

To be honest with you, I used to be the one who was most skeptical of this "List of principles". Whenever someone starts talking about the effect of that thing in a briefing, I'm going to pour the whole person into the chair and think: "It's great to have a nod like a pound of garlic in the text offensive and start again." "I just want to get to the heart of the business and talk about real design," he pointed out.

I should not underestimate those words, but the truth is that they are really few and good.

Our design should be simple.

Our design should be self-explanatory to the user.

Our design should be lot better.

Like everyone else, I would like to raise my hand and say, "Sorry, I would rather have a complicated design, a guide, and a broken eye." "Those principles, which are too broad or too obvious, are likely to be as meaningless as they are," he said. These principles do little to help the most important decisions, nor do they allow team members to Unison and clearly understand what matters.

On the other hand, a good set of design principles should look like this:

The ability to solve practical problems around specific design decisions.

To apply the entire hierarchy of design decisions, including what we want today, and the problems that will arise in the future.

For "Why?" Explanation, to consider people-oriented, not only to let the designers understand, for non-designers should also be easy to understand.

Your opinion of things, the priority of expulsion, a rational person can disagree.

To be able to match the image example, show how this principle applies to specific decisions.

Do you need an example? Apple's Human Interface guidelines and Google's Material design guidelines have done a great job of explaining their designs, as well as demonstrating how powerful design principles can be. Imagine that the ultimate goal of Apple and Google is to make sure that high-quality apps look like they are on their own platforms, so that their own design team can meet and respond to a major external developer, as we mentioned earlier, Two designers talk to each other about the 1000 design decisions. That's not going to work.

Rather than relying on the gatekeeper to maintain a high standard of design quality, it is better to have a small, well-recognized set of guiding principles that will make the best decisions in a consistent way, expand to more decisions, and involve more designers.

So the next time you want to share your design, or even before you talk about design, take a moment to define the principles clearly.

We believe that the most important principle of communicating with people is to be quick, but to minimize differences.

In order to do so, we will adopt a familiar system design pattern, so that people do not need to learn new things-standard table view, tab bar Navigation⋯⋯ We do not use a person bold color or bizarre animation experiment to put things on the product. For the features that people will use, we'll try to get them done within one or two clicks.

Good principles are tested, they have weight, they have a certainty. What looks right and what feels good-these are just superficial things. A great designer who defends his work relies on the principle that it is the principle that can continue to make one decision after another, thousands of decisions, and will not sway with the wind.