User experience and product design: professional things to do professionally in the field

Article Description: user experience and product design.

I see someone ask: "If the product manager has learned the UED thinking way to do product design, then does not need the interactive designer this position?" ”

The subtext of this question is: As long as you learn the ued way of thinking, you can do interactive design. Great fallacy!

This reminds me of a very hot and vague word: "professionals". How do you count professionals? How do you do professional things in a professional field?

My own view is that to be a "professional" in a field, you must at least meet the following three conditions:

One, ponder the essence and core knowledge of the field

The main point of "professionalism" is depth, then breadth. The so-called depth, is to grasp the essence. and grasp the essence of the premise is: Do not be floating in the face of things, the details of things to take attention, but to have the initiative to explore the essence of the phenomenon behind.

For example, the information graph (infographics) is very popular now, many people like to see just because they are beautiful. As we all know, the essence of information graphs is to make use of the high efficiency features of people's visual cognitive processing, to help people to understand and integrate a large amount of information and data in order to help make rational decisions. If you just want to be beautiful and add too much flashy modification, it will interfere with the reading of the data, violating the first law of information visualization: Edward Tufte Master of the data ink ratio principle. In fact, some of the information charts abroad are mixed, and the inferior are everywhere.

In addition to the essence, I must quote Liu Weipeng's sentence: "To learn a knowledge, you must ask yourself three questions: (1) What is its essence, (2) what its first principle is, (3.) Its knowledge structure." ”

Second, flexible application of the method in this field

Some people think that learning some basic methods has become a professional, thinking that the acquisition method is to become a "professional" shortcut. Fact The degree of familiarity of the method is shown whether the optimal method or method combination can be flexibly chosen according to the target of the task and the limitation of the task, even if there is no optimal method to improve the existing method and realize the innovation of the method.

In many cases, people use the method, always with some dogmatic thinking, some mechanistic ideas. For example, in the field of user research, persona popular, think persona is the best way, a swarm of persona; log analysis popular, on the swarm of log analysis. In fact, no one is perfect, to understand the scope of each method, to its strengths and limitations to have a clear understanding. Further, each method has its core essence, and the essence of the method is the precondition of good method.

More importantly, the so-called method, in fact, there are two levels: one is the tool method, that is, the specific means to achieve something, the second is the thinking method, is the analysis of specific tasks, design solutions to the thinking strategy and ability. Usually people only pay attention to the former, but neglect the cultivation of the latter. The so-called thinking method, specifically, in user research, a very critical way of thinking is "transformation (transformation)", that is, the user's needs and behavior characteristics into product innovation, product requirements and attribute restrictions, this transformation process is very good, In addition, the thinking method that must be honed is the fusion and iteration of inductive thinking and deductive thinking. In product innovation design, a key thinking method is the thinking master Edward De Pono "lateral thinking" to find out the different solution; in the interactive design, Rigorous logical thinking and rigorous poor thinking are essential, and in the design of the presentation layer, be good at discovering the associations between different experiences.

Third, Build your own case Library

There is no theory or method of light, and a case library, called a material library, or toolbox, is needed to install a large number of common problems and solutions in the field. This requirement stems from the current understanding of the human brain in psychology: The human brain is empirical, not deductive, logical. The expression of experience is "pattern". The intellectual process of the human brain is pattern recognition: to match the characteristics of the problem currently encountered with the pattern in the existing pattern library (fuzzy), and once the match is successful, the existing solution of the pattern in the pattern library is dealt with. Building a case library in a professional field is to create a library of patterns for the brain that helps the brain quickly match and respond to a variety of common professional problems. Because people's real-time cognitive resources are limited, the advantage of owning a schema library is that people can save cognitive resources to deal with all kinds of incurable diseases, accidents and exceptions that cannot be matched after a quick response to common problems.

The requirement of establishing an experience base means that a person must have sufficient "accumulation" to become a professional. And this accumulation is not measured by the amount of time and the number of cases. Because only the deep processing of the case and material can enter the brain pattern library, be called quickly. This also means that borrowing the accumulated experience of others is ineffective, must be set up by themselves.

The above three points can only be regarded as a necessary condition for "professionals" rather than sufficient conditions. Since I have not yet cultivated myself as a professional, I do not know what is the sufficient condition to become a "professional", I just know that less than three of any of the same, can not become "professional".

Then analyze the problem that this article starts to know: Learn the way of thinking of xxx, does not mean that you have mastered the nature of xxx (because only "learning" rather than "ponder"), does not mean that you can flexibly apply the method of XXX, more does not mean that you have accumulated your own case library. So, brothers and sisters, sharpen it slowly.