Uidesign to Zen Environment

Uidesign to Zen Environment

I have a colleague who is engaged in uidesign. He is a professional art design engineer and is well-developed through self-study and front-end programming (he is familiar with cirpt, Ajax, and jQury ), I have carefully studied the UCD, UI, and other books and materials that can be found on the Internet and purchased by bookstores. I also have many practical project experiences in several companies. This is obviously a talent, the most expensive in the 21st century! He is my teacher in UI.

What do I want to say? Apparently it's not an introduction to people. He's just a child. I want to explain the story through a case: 1) an interesting example of a design to the "Zen environment"; 2) a design that is out of the professional field and has no business understanding, such as a paper discussion. 3) Give me a sigh of relief.

The case is as follows: In this project, we will design a DAQ (data collection) product for a LIMS company. Here, the data is collected directly from a variety of different experimental instruments, then processed and analyzed, and then sent to the LIMS system through WebService. Its users are lab workers. On a remote workstation, they need to observe the experiment, monitor and manipulate the instrument, need the required data, and finally generate the original record of the experiment.

In this project, we do not focus on LIMS, but on DPC. We try to make it the best way for users to use it. As for how to deal with a variety of interfaces, and how to automatically collect data from communication ports and protocols such as RS485, 232, and MudBuse, we don't care how we process the data through the data warehouse. We just pay attention to the UI, which is our long term! So we are on the road.

Through several days of analysis, we have produced results. It is a concise and beautiful design (the interface is omitted ). You can click the mouse three times to obtain the required data. In the background management, the user can complete all his operations in one interface. As a result, we were presented to our headers and business personnel at the review meeting. As a result, the design does not pass the review. Why?

There are two problems. First, the business staff say this is useless! In the previous step of the whiteboard, they simulated the user's actual operations and various possibilities. This is called customer behavior analysis? At the same time, we will discuss how users can make it easier here. Oh, that was the case! So we didn't start to analyze user requirements? Done. However, it is not in-depth enough. Why not go deep? Is it because we are not dedicated? No, because we don't understand the business. From the perspective of UCD, from the perspective of UI, subjective consideration of how to make it more convenient and more beautiful. However, when we do not know the in-depth business process, even if we do this, it is still like scratching the itch, not all the places.

So we have to design it again. In the process of re-design, we still have to look back and focus on the things that our original brain cells are not good at and don't want to care about, and the business things that combine professional knowledge, you even have to ask the programmer what your program architecture is like. Let me talk about the logical relationship between different components and the logical relationship between DAQ and LIMS during interaction.

So where is the Zen environment? Is the design of the final result. First, the best design is no design! Nothing can be seen on the interface! No operations! When we are excited about how to place those button icons on the screen and make them look better and better, the business staff suggested that the lab staff should open the corresponding page in the LIMS system, the data is already there, and he does not need to do anything. The data is displayed in front of him. I suddenly found an empty Zen in my mind. After several days of hard work, the best interface design was: there was nothing on the interface! The header is really a header, high!

Wait, it sounds Zen, but there is a problem. The problem comes from programmers. The programmer said: we can achieve this, but we need to install the client on each workstation. This does not conform to our design principles; or, you have to design a program to continuously detect the status of those devices from the server side, and obtain the data if possible, which may cause some trouble to the system performance, it also increases the programming workload.

What should I do? After discussion, the final result is: On the experimenter's interface, there is only one button related to this "original record" (of course there are other required buttons ). That is to say, the experimenter only needs a few clicks to obtain the experiment data and generate the original record he needs. It is easy for the lab staff and does not conflict with the underlying design of the program.

From complexity to simplicity, Ultimate simplicity and simplicity. Einstein is really right: As simple as possible, but not simpler.

Null and degree. This is a bit of a Zen, But I have such feelings.

I have read many posts and comments on many UCD and UI forums and groups on the Internet, and I have learned a lot. Of course, most of them involve the internet, and there are relatively few software aspects in combination with certain specialized fields. However, I always think that many of my friends have good design concepts, aesthetics, and skills, and they are good enough. However, if you do not have a professional domain, do not know the actual business, or do not know the first-line needs of the domain, it is hard to exert your skills. It may be just a beautiful figure.

My colleague's career goal is: Product Manager. His idea is: if you really want to be a qualified product manager and have enough UCD skills, you need to strengthen your understanding of the business in this field, let's look at the first-line work scenarios and understand the 17025 standards in this field (it is said that it is the outline of the LIMS system), and learn more or less about some underlying programming overview, for example, the framework structure of the current development platform is roughly. Once you get this done, you will naturally be competent as the product manager. If you cannot reach this level, you will never be able to get on that level, and you will always stay at the "painting" level. In addition, you are also worried about spending time in this "narrow" field. Isn't it useless to switch to other aspects? For example, if I do another CRM software design, wouldn't I be able to use it? No. The so-called just the same way, when you get to know which one is really transparent, one day you will suddenly find the feeling of epiphany, at least for the management of software has a feeling of a whole. Just like playing a real-time strategic game, when you hit the Rome Renaissance to hit copper at 12 seconds, you can also get started quickly when you play Starcraft again, because your spirit and Internal Force have reached that position, it's not easy to think about it.