How to work with a designer?

This article is from Facebook product design director Julie Zhuo published in Medium 〈how to Work with designers〉

Years ago, I was a product manager, then an engineer, and for the past seven years I've been working on design. Every day I work with people who play these roles, and every day, I have a new understanding of the responsibilities, challenges and art behind product development. This article is written for you and the engineers and product managers who want to design this strange, sharp, helvetica-typed world.

If you want to use the designer language, please stop saying those metrics and change the user.

In fact, most of the cases, "indicator" and "user" meaning is not too far away. For example, you might want to set a goal to increase the conversion rate of the registration page by x, and the other is: you want to remove the barriers that prevent users from registering and using products.

But you see, "saying" is becoming important here-making it easier for users to register vs. Optimize the conversion rate for the registration process. The former talks about the value of the user, the latter is the company's success in order to generate the demand. The mindset of the designer is generally more biased towards the user side.

Other like:

Can I increase the click rate of this button?=> how can we let users know how simple this intimate new feature is?

We hope that this change will not impact on the indicators. => we need to make sure that this change doesn't make it difficult for users to use.

Come on, raise the viral spread factor.!=> encourages users who like this feature to share it with their friends.

Author: Julie Zhuo (Photo source: Silverisdead)

Each designer has its own strengths, and these strengths need to be used to solve the right problem.

Every designer is different, even the "All-Star" designer is not thinking about the problem because the design includes:

Visual design: Does this category contain fonts, contrasts, hierarchies, and "Old things look good?" And so on. Did you see the right place? are the details in the past or sloppy? The most important thing is whether the visual design is systematic.

Interactive design: Is it easy for users to do X? is the navigation system doing well? Do transformations and animations make apps more intuitive?

Product Design: Is this design successful in solving the problem? Is this design working? Is there a clear vision for the product?

Some designers are surprised by the visual performance, but have little experience in interactive design, and some designers can make smart product strategies, but they are weaker at execution level. Every design area has very difficult problems to solve, it is very important to pick out the right designer to solve the problem. You can't just replace a designer and expect a new designer to act like your predecessor on the project.

In general, to make a good design, you have to be exhaustive. If you can only have one designer, he'd better be a generalist than a strong one, others are bad, whereas if you have a team of designers, it might work to get a lot of expertise in the field.

The more senior designers, the more they should be responsible for solving abstract problems.

To further illustrate, I use the following several levels and corresponding responsibilities as examples:

Designer Level One: Design a form for users to edit their profile. This is clear-assuming that users have personal files to edit, the solution is to design a table on demand.

Designer Level Two: Design a good interface for users to edit their personal files. The solution can be a table, a WYSIWYG (WYSIWYG) editor, or a pop-up window.

Designer (wide): Design a system for editing personal files, publishing articles, changing settings, and so on. Now we're talking not just about editing personal files, but about having a flexible editorial system that runs across the entire app.

Designer class Three (deep): Design a method that allows users to "want" to update their profile. Here, what we're talking about is that designers need to ask themselves: why should users go to update their personal files? When to update? How to properly deliver such a request (please user Update profile)?

Designer level four: for the app to design a solution that can improve the authenticity of the user, "edit personal files" may not be our focus at all, perhaps a system that allows users to test each other (Peer-review) will be better.

Designer Grade Five: to be able to discover the biggest problem for app/company/website, and design a solution. At this level, the top designers will be able to promote a product vision.

In other words, if a senior designer has a deep grasp of the product's strategy and vision, they will show a high degree of productivity. Conversely, if a senior designer is assigned a rookie level task (e.g., designing a form), but he doesn't think that the form will be the best way to solve the problem, he will not only be very unhappy, he may also behave badly. Being in this state of tension is the source of team morale: the more experienced a designer is, the more frustrated they feel if they cannot fully identify with the product's vision or strategy.

The more time a designer spends with other designers, the better the work becomes (the designer himself)

It is one of the best ways for the designer to make comments on other designer works. If a designer always works alone and never communicates his work with his peers, it can almost guarantee that their design will be worse than the results of regular communication. This is why designers are encouraged to work more with other designers during the project development phase (the design is constantly changing) and are encouraged to work with the engineers only during the execution phase of the project (when the main design is finalized and execution becomes more important).

The effort and value that designers pay for their work is hard to measure.

This is because a designer's goal is to achieve a high quality experience-not just one face of the product, but the whole experience, and it can stand the test of time. Let's talk about clutter (clutter), from the qualitative point of view, we usually think that clutter is not good, then the design to add things to what extent will become "too messy"? It's hard to quantify. Similarly, the newly added design is unlikely to affect users immediately, but slowly, like the waves at 1.1 points to the cliff, the more things, one day users will find your site becomes messy. It's too late to have other, cleaner, minimalist apps popping up to solve your app's problems.

Similarly, designers often push for consistency between a app or a different part of the system. Perhaps this looks too picky, because at the functional level, if the process of uploading photos is consistent, is that enough?

The problem is that users are not just uploading photos. They may also upload videos, which can be confusing if they are designed to be completely separate from the way they are uploaded. It can be painful for users to upload photos or videos. Imagine if your computer's "file" options are different in every program, some on the top left, at the top right, the bottom, or anywhere, and it's definitely a nightmare.

Indeed, sometimes designers lose control of weight and balance. Designers tend to pay too much attention to personal experience and despise the whole. In the same way, designers are sometimes not the target users of the product, but they will use their personal experience as an indicator and decide where to focus. (Of course, what I'm talking about here doesn't necessarily apply to all designers.) However, in fact, because design has been changing, short-term quantitative indicators have gone up and down, difficult to assess, such as the user's trust, understanding, and long-term feelings and joy-will be driven by the designers have a positive impact, but it is difficult to quantify the number.

The designer cares more about the details.

Really, you want to make the designer blush and get dizzy? Simulate each pixel in place, set a high standard, do not take the bad, in order to complete a small detail to take a step further, or spend a night to do those who set the Ming is to please the user's things.

Every designer I know is very happy to sacrifice the night and the weekend with the product managers and engineers who respect the value of the design and work together to achieve what each of us believes in and what everyone in the team wants to do.