Inspiration for design + the power of research

Preface: Immersed in the work at the beginning of the key items, almost forget to write articles, ashamed. Sharing is learning, without sharing there is no opportunity to learn, 2013 should continue to write more. At the same time also summed up 2012 years of writing, found that many times I am interested in various articles, phenomena, writing design notes and thinking. Sometimes thinking all kinds of things, and not summed up to be very practical. Later will improve, more to take inspiration text + actual text writing rhythm.

Today, is a practical article.

It is a story about the designer's inspiration, discovering problems, thinking problems, facing challenges, and using research to work closely together to solve problems and achieve goals.

is a complete and rigorous design of the revision of the story.

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2012 is responsible for Tencent open Platform Application Center products, the first time to seriously look at this product, always feel that what is wrong:

The above page, I saw a main content page, there are banner area, navigation on the left, the middle is app content, the right there is a leaderboard. Keep looking down:

Pull down the page, see the above picture, began a little confused. Because the trend of this page down, did not give me an understanding. The layout of information and content is a bit messy. The navigation and content area is not aligned, so I read less efficient.

Then pull down the page, the above figure. This time the reading disorder began to increase, I saw a variety of information piled up on the page. When the left navigation is over, the content starts piling up, and it appears in a position where I have absolutely no expectations. The app content pattern in the middle is consistent with no focus. The advertisement again let the pattern again disorderly a bit. Here, I have been very difficult to read content effectively.

Many designers know that users can read the Web page without reading it verbatim. They scan, quickly find the point, and then read according to their interests and choices. The focus can be a bold text, a picture, a cleverly formatted paragraph of text, and so on.

This page doesn't give me a scan for logic and fun. So my reading doesn't feel comfortable.

My reading order for this page is as follows:

As pictured above, I began by reading 1, personal information, and then reading down to 2, navigation, to 3, the content area, because the display of the app is very consistent, without focus, I quickly skipped 3, quickly swept the next 4, not interested, jump to 5, read the list, and soon finished reading.

The purpose of this web page is very simple, is to want users to explore, click App, and install and then play. But now the layout does not let me have the impulse to operate this way. There must be a problem. Of course, I'm just a user, a reading case. After the use of research, we invited users to the eye movement tester, will see more reading mode.

So here, the designer's inspiration brings some important questions:

The above is only part of the problem, but simple and clear, need to modify the design. To explain the mark in my upper right corner, I think this page has a problem with the content (here is a methodology that mainly elaborates my idea that all product designs are designed to create, consume, and spread the content). The lower right corner is what I think the Web page should be modified in design: User scenarios, information architecture, interactive design, visual design, design details, user sentiment.

The designer's observations, inspirations, and conclusions are all coming out, then?

As a platform product for service Tens users, inspiration alone is unconvincing. In the above Application Center page, all layout, content arrangement, have very rigorous business strategy and data pressure. Any blind modification will have great risks.

How to prove your own inspiration? How to prove your own judgment?

With research.

This product revision, has two times with the research point is very important.

The first time is the eye Movement instrument test and the analysis. We ask users of the Application Center to perform eye movement testing, to understand the user's reading patterns and to verify our previous judgments.

As shown above, we decompose the entire Application Center page into modules and then help us to observe the user's reading mode through the eye-moving instrument.

As shown above, you can see that each user is reading in a different order. But through the analysis, we find that although the reading order is different, but the result is consistent. Users like I read before, fast reading, can not find the focus, ignoring the app content this key block, the entire layout of the page does not have a clear understanding.