How to Design great products: design should not be a blueprint to learn to tell stories

　　

 

Narrative-oriented design process is efficient

For product design teams, the biggest problem they face is that they often confuse fashionable products with superior functionality. On the surface, this is a trivial mistake, but it will cause very serious consequences: after all, if users don't play with your products, even if they look good, no one will buy them.

I think the best way to eliminate this obstacle is to adopt a narrative-centered design approach. The core concept of this approach is to propose a series of descriptive use cases for the product. from the user's point of view, each step of the product design is clearly described. I have recommended this design method to a large number of startups. It always allows the design team to ignore superficial articles and make better decisions on issues that really matter to users: how to make the best use of products.

Design should not be a blueprint

I have noticed that some teams tend to be perfunctory in UI (User Interface) design when proposing product blueprints. Each screen displays the appearance of the product under different circumstances, but these screens are not linked in some way. The crux of the problem is that when the design scheme is presented to everyone in this way, users only have a rough understanding of the product appearance.

The design team did not focus on the product's working mechanism, nor did it simulate how customers interact with the product. Therefore, when some teams unilaterally regard the design as a product blueprint, their comprehensive reasoning capabilities of product interaction will be severely limited.

The best product designers tend to be proficient in narrative-based design techniques, and use this method to improve perfection. First, they will come up with several stories to let customers understand how to interact with products. Only after achieving this goal can they design screens and tell them a story about product interaction.

Main Design Line Based on Narration

In a narrative-based design process, the design team first needs to analyze dozens of sequential models, which are like a picture in a slide. Next, they will present every sentence they read, every action they make, and every screen produced by the system response.

From the initial trigger event to the completion of a goal, the designer must listen to the customer's suggestions at any time, and show how the design solution supports each step throughout the process with examples. I have recommended this narrative-based design method to many startups. These methods are applicable to mobile applications, marketing websites, data analysis, enterprise IT departments, and other businesses.

Engineers should be familiar with this design process. The core of the narrative design is similar to the test-driven development process. However, we do not use tests to check the code. Instead, we just use stories to test the design scheme. Just like the test-driven development process, the narrative-based design process can have an astonishing impact on the team's execution and product quality.

　Progressive storytelling

1. Whiteboard story

At the beginning of the design scheme, designers should clearly write on the whiteboard how to interact with customers and teams. First, draw a pile of 1-square-foot boxes on the whiteboard, then fill in every small case of customer-product interaction in the box, and connect each important part together. Finally, it outlines every place that the user will touch or click. This step takes a long time, but once the entire team reaches an agreement on the core of the story, the remaining steps will be completed much faster and less time will be wasted.

　2. Change tools

Most design tools are used to make posters or books, so they are useless when designing interactive stories filled with a large number of frameworks. Therefore, give up Photoshop as soon as possible and select Tools such as Keynote, OmniGraffle, or Fireworks. These tools support multi-page design and help designers focus on building end-to-end information flows.

　3. Never comment on a single screen

If someone sends one or two models for evaluation, be careful. Make sure that your team is always evaluating the complete story. If you submit the design scheme in person, print each screen on paper and post it on every corner of the room. In this way, everyone can see the overview and details on each screen. If you must use an email to send a design scheme, you must take screenshots to capture the whole process of merging the screens into a complete story.

Why is the narrative-oriented design process so efficient?

Simulate user experience. The narration-based design method forces us to take the customer experience as the starting point in every aspect of the design process. In this way, from designers, engineers to CEOs, the entire team will have a complete system and can make design decisions based on the specific feelings of people's experience products.

Discover problems in advance. As the narrative feature adds a time dimension, various design mistakes will be highlighted. If the Team regards the product as a pile of screens, they will not notice these mistakes. The narration also makes it easier for the team to notice when the ideal expectations are not met. At the same time, they will find some redundant and completely unfeasible UI links and solve them more quickly. All these seemingly insignificant details can ultimately improve the practicability and interaction of the product.

Pre-define design objectives. When the team starts designing a product in the form of a story, everyone must reach an agreement on the design goal before solving the specific details. This is of great benefit to the product design work, because the scope of the evaluation is often reduced to a problem after the designer studies the detailed UI model for several hours, that is, whether the design scheme meets the preset goal.

More scientific. Looking back at the customer from the initial trigger event (such as email or information push) to the final completion of the goal, we will find that the entire process is actually different from "Dr. Fork" (Dr. BJ Fogg) The proposed behavior model is extremely consistent, that is, trigger, incentive, and ability are all three factors at the same time, indispensable. The narrative-based design scheme makes it easy for us to check whether all of the above three elements are in place, so as to encourage user behavior.

Accelerate the entire design process. Some stories can be reused in other work of the team. Models created to show stories can be quickly and clickable product prototypes used to study user behavior. The same story can also be used to build channel analysis to help uncover the answer to a question, that is, whether the user is practicing this story in a real product. The quality assurance (QA) team can also comprehensively screen important stories to ensure the rationality of each new product.

This article is compiled from Gigaom

(Xuancheng)