Focus on goals, trade-offs-trade-offs and decisions in design

We have recently shelves a weather application, Skyline Weather. I came up with design concepts when I was sleeping.

The idea of many things is created from dreams. Paul McCartney is said to have written the song of yesterday in his dream. It was also said that he had spent weeks looking around for people who had heard the song, until enough people said no, and he was sure it was his original, subconscious song.

It is said that Ileas Hau also completed his sewing machine invention in his dream. He dreamt that he had been caught in a primitive tribe, and that the primitive man had tied him up and prepared to roast it, and he had keenly noticed that the spear used by the primitive man had a small hole in the end. It was this detail that inspired him and then the design of the sewing machine.

And I myself, is because of the flu and bed ... I wanted to see what the weather was like, so I got out of my cell phone and found it hard to get the weather information quickly and easily in any one of the weather applications through sleepy blurred eyes, especially the weather changes in the next few hours. I feel that there must be some optimization and simplification of the work that can be done.

Then I went to sleep. And then I woke up with two basic concepts emerging in my mind:

The

displays the weather information in an hourly timeline, showing the temperature fluctuations visually. Focus on how the weather will change over the next few hours, not just the current situation.

I quickly sketched out the grass and went back to bed to get sick.

As a designer, I can't work without sketches. Every time I reexamine my sketches, I can find some flaws in my thoughts, and a thought that looks good in the middle of the night is probably not the case in the daytime. However, when I open my Weather application sketch again, it looks very good! ...

This concept allows the weather information to be presented to the user in a highly visible way, and the information looks more like a recognizable picture than a text that people have to devote their attention to reading. Most of the weather applications I've seen are filled with tiny pieces of textual information, fine weather symbols and numbers that require the user to spend effort to identify and understand.

User Experience Sketch design: properly designed and properly designed

This book focuses on the design process before and after the balance, the front-end focus on the sketch and design ideas, the backend is to ensure availability and engineering two aspects. The goal is to build a design idea: transform the new technology into a product form that can serve the society and reflect the value ...

Related books recommended

Text vs. Graphics

When reading the text, people will read one word at a time, and then put together the meaning of the whole text in the mind. Text helps people communicate more complex information, but at the same time reduces the rate at which they digest information. The right graphical element allows you to immediately understand the general concept and then get the details in the shortest possible time.

Skyline Weather's design goal is to allow users a simple glimpse of the core information can be obtained, as if looking at pictures.

Of course, if you need to, you can still dig out more weather information, just click on the screen can be. In order to achieve "fast" design goals, we must hide or discard some data to reduce the density of information.

you can't please everyone

But some of the early test users we were looking for were very explicit in their desire to see more and more dense information. Some of them live in rainwater-rich areas, so they especially want data on precipitation probabilities, while others who surf regularly (yes, even in Montreal, where there is no sea) want to know more about the original meteorological data.

But there are also some testers who understand our design philosophy and agree with the overall style of "clarity" and "simplicity". Obviously, we can't meet two target users at the same time, we have to make a choice, even if it means we need to say "no" to a subset of the potential users. Small and beautiful, or all-inclusive, these two lines, although contradictory, but you can not say that any one is right or wrong, we just need to solve the problem of their products to choose the most appropriate.

Design is a kind of relationship ... It should reflect the relationship between the various aspects of a problem ... – rand

Rand, a well-known graphic designer (IBM, UPS, Next and other companies logo designers), basically do not use the computer. The actual value of computer in graphic design is not very large, of course, we refer to the RAND career of those decades (30 to 90). After the computer began to show value in the design field, Paul asked his subordinates to do things that needed to be done on the computer. Even so, his understanding of the nature of design can be applied to today's software interface design.

The art of weighing

Design is a trade-off-essentially, the design is to identify who your target users are, what problems they encounter, and what solutions they need. The smaller the target audience, the more targeted the design, but this often means the exclusion of some users.

As John Gruber of daring fireball, weather applications are a UI playground for playing with a variety of design ideas. This is a very interesting space to explore, because its content varies, and the needs of different types of people for such applications vary.

Similar Products

A few weeks after the release of Skyline weather, we have seen a fascinating picture of the same kind of design ideas converging in reality. Open weather line and you'll see a nice, concise interface designed by Ryan Jones and his team. On their website, Jones expressed the same dissatisfaction with me about the visual complexity of most of today's weather applications: "Nowadays weather applications, mostly through tables or lists, show information, and you need to read it yourself before you can form a set of invisible weather forecasts in your mind." ”

In general, the products of our two families look very similar. This is not surprising, because our design philosophy is almost consistent. We have the same goal to address the problems of other weather applications in the same way:

Two applications are focused on changing weather trends over time. There are icon symbols at each point in time to indicate the time weather state. The change in the position of the weather symbol on the vertical represents the fluctuation of temperature and the trend of weather change at a glance. Click any time period to see more details. Also use data from Forecast.io.

Say even the application name is very similar, my family is called Skyline Weather, his home is called Weather line. We've never been in contact with Jones or his team, but we are almost in agreement on the design decisions, including the various details that need to be compromised. We are all committed to solving the same problem, and we all know that our products are not pleasing to everyone.

There is no perfect design, because all you can do is strike a balance between relationships. In the proper order, adding any element will break the balance. – Rand

When talking about the merits of a design, be sure to see a variety of compromise decisions. "Bad Design" is true, but more often than not, so-called "flaws" can actually be interpreted as some kind of "imbalance".

Just as humans cannot claim to have evolved better than cockroaches, a product that boasts a better design is not necessarily better designed than a cheap product. Expensive teapots from well-known designers may look and feel better than Wal-Mart, which may use better materials and ergonomic, but that does not mean that cheap bulk goods do not meet its own design goals. They have their own target markets and cannot be applied to all usage scenarios.

From the original concept sketch, to the months of careful polishing, we have a lot of skyline weather. Even so, we understand that it cannot be a product that can meet the needs of thousands of iphone users at the same time. There is no design that works perfectly for all users in all situations, and we sometimes need to make difficult choices between different user groups and identify what problems our products are going to solve. If we try to satisfy everyone, there can only be one final outcome--the product cannot do the best in any one way, at most it can only reach the "not bad" level. Only by focusing on their specific target audience, and focusing on how to better serve them, can designers find real and practical solutions.

This article comes from being for web English original: https://medium.com/ux-ui-design/5d3093bf525f translator information: C7210-ux player, interactive Designer, once vision and front end, Cat slave, guitar Fucker.