At the headquarters of Palo Alto today, Facebook's design team shared their design ideas and how they designed products for 250 million of users. In particular, they highlighted the following points:
- To write code frequently (get your hands dirty)
- Share design early and frequently (share early & often)
- The design process starts at the beginning of the project to the end (being there from start to finish)
- Don't fall in love with your design (don ' t fall in loves)
It is particularly important to ensure that designers have the technical skills to write a lot of code.
Some other information:
- The work of the Facebook design team includes product design, marketing, UI mode, branding, and front-end development. The team consists of 15 product designers, 5 UI engineers, 5 user experience researchers, 4 interaction designers, and a content architect. In this company of about 1000 employees, the design team has a total of 25 people.
- Integrate design and technology into the entire corporate culture by composing all the code from the previous End-to-end code.
1 designers need to participate in the whole process: from strategy to release. This is different from other companies.
- Facebook spends a lot of time and effort to ensure that designers can participate in the entire product development process.
- For example: March Homepage Revision release, streamline information architecture and improve the flow rate of page information. Such changes need to involve both data structures and visual structures.
- After defining the visual style, start writing code to make the prototype. Designers write code to see how real data works in the layout of a page.
- Constantly balancing trade-offs, through iterative interaction design and visual design to do a lot of attempts.
- Demonstrate static product prototypes and interactive presentations to management and other teams.
- Let the designer write the code to find the details and quickly implement the changes.
2 share ideas early and frequently. Understand that users can help achieve better design.
- There is no creative director on Facebook, but a bottom-up design team structure. This is essential for the team to share their ideas.
- Develop tools to share efficiently. One of these tools, called Pixelcloud, is similar to an online gallery with a comment function. Since the tool was released in March, about 15 creative images have been shared around the site every day.
- The entire team covers visual design and front-end development, which ensures that Facebook's design remains consistent in style. All working groups have a fixed set of time to provide feedback to designers.
- For example, the Privacy Wizard design. In the Project initiation phase (kickoff phase), assemble 12 users and show them 30 prototypes to determine the direction of the product development. In the product development phase, a relatively small number of users are summoned again to show them 7 prototypes to determine the specific design.
- Feedback is effective. Get feedback as much and as early as possible, which helps save project time.
3 diligence, the most important thing is to understand how the code is run. All the designers have to write some html,css, even PHP.
- The difference between fuzzy design and technology. Designers can also debug code and create quick prototypes.
- Designers are often wrong in designing too succinctly, while engineers are wrong in providing too much functionality.
- Understand the type of media you work for and constantly rethink your design.
- Quick action. Facebook has a lot of competitors in many areas, and the habit of users using the web is constantly changing, so it's important to quickly iterate over the product.
- At its core, Facebook believes that the most effective way to do this is to quickly release the product and see how users are using it.
- The archetype lies. They often lack content and contextual connections. Therefore, it is necessary to use real content and page design to understand how the specific design works.
- In order to react quickly, we need to make prototypes quickly. For example, the UI for the comment is first tested and modified internally before being published to the user. The new design breaks the visual circuitry of the original stream of information.
- Designers typically submit 40 versions of code per week.
4 Don't fall in love with your design. The life of the software is short, it is always changing, you need to accept the fact.
- Your aim is to ensure that the design works properly and can be continuously improved.
- Do not miss today's achievements, to always look forward. As a designer, you need to anticipate and think about how things will change in the next year.
- At Facebook, the longest-lasting design is the home page, which was released from 2004 and lasted 18 months.
- For example: Global navigation of the revision. Tried countless ideas in a few months. Even the head of the site changed yesterday.
- Our work is far from complete compared to any time in the past.
- Do A/b test for most features. Clearly define metrics for measuring effects and measure them, but don't let metrics drive the design.
