Why is it difficult to replicate Apple's excellent design?

[Csdn compilation in August 5] (Wen/yang dongjie) a series of dazzling successes, making apple, together with its products and leaders, a target for everyone to follow, many IT bosses in China are also loyal "fruit powders". Among the industry-recognized factors of Apple's success, Apple's unconventional product design ranks first, but why can't other companies replicate Apple's success by learning its excellent design culture? A human-computer interaction professional in the United States believes that the role of designers in IT enterprises where the engineer culture prevails is relatively weak, and the root cause of the failure to fundamentally influence product strategies is the biggest cause.

The full text is as follows:

I attended the Microsoft Summit recently. This is the annual meeting for Microsoft to discuss major events and strategic directions. During the discussion, one Microsoft designer mentioned two data that I had heard before but was not sure about: 1. at Microsoft, the ratio of developers to uidesigners is 50: 1. 2. This ratio is superior to any other company.

Just like all the teachers who teach human-computer interaction, I am interested in promoting this topic, so I went on to ask a sharp question: "From the Perspective of Association and individual scale, microsoft has more designers than Apple and Google. However, I think most people still think that Apple and Google products are good and easy to use. Is this an organizational, process, or skill issue? How can I explain this question to my students ?"

I want to clarify that I am not dedicated to disclosing Microsoft's short content,This is actually a common problem for software companies: how can we effectively integrate design into products?Because, frankly speaking, many of the current uidesign is a headache.

Nintendo, Apple, Google, and Amazon have provided examples of outstanding design. Why are other companies failing to follow suit? Maybe the real question is, why did other companies fail to follow suit?

On this issue, I discussed this summit with many people in Silicon Valley. I used Microsoft as an example, but I think the same problem applies to many enterprises.

People give me five explanations.

The first is the "Geek culture" that governs the engineering field. In most software enterprises, excellent designers have never been granted the highest level of authorization, engineers usually have a broad influence and say on product features and components.

Secondly, no one in the company is responsible for the UI and user experience of all products. Therefore, users usually feel that there is no unified specification and continuity for the entire system.

Third, in a series of product creation processes, it is usually too late for designers to intervene. It is often because the entire system has been built and the designers just complete some superficial work. Someone described it as "applying lipsticks to a pig ". Design is not only the presentation layer of visual interaction, but also about understanding how users work and play games, how they integrate things with people's lives, and how they view and understand things, what are their problems and how to carefully prepare products to solve user problems.

Fourth, designers do not have real rights in most organizations. They are more like consultants and cannot push for any changes.

Fifth, from a professional perspective, many people do not really understand design. They think that design is just a beautiful interface. The general prejudice against design comes from the current computer science education, with more emphasis on algorithms and engineering and no time to design such as behavioral science, social science, anthropology, or various forms, of course, engineering design, graphic design, or interactive design are ignored.

In short, the above is a fundamental issue of industry development. It is not enough to recruit Interaction designers or increase the ratio of developers and designers. Due to the "design thinking" style in the industry, programs and well-designed products that reach the level of human-computer interaction are increasing, people begin to realize the importance of design, but do not know how to integrate design into software products in a fundamental way. However, when systems are complicated and need to be integrated with software, hardware, and services, this problem will become more serious, and such complex systems will become more and more in the future.

Link: http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/96476-why-is-great-design-so-hard/fulltext

 

 

From: http://news.csdn.net/a/20100805/277873.html