How Facebook's designers work

A few years ago, to see Google China's office environment, envious. Oh, in fact, more envy of hundreds of snacks and drinks can be casually enjoy * ^-^ *. High-tech companies seem to pay more attention to the office environment, after all, the relaxed and comfortable environment can inspire people's creativity and compressive resistance.

Facebook, based in Palo Alto, boasts more than 4 million registered users and 600,000 users per day. Facebook employees inspire creativity and enthusiasm in a 150,000-square-foot, oversized office.

It's better to see how Facebook designers work.

Facebook's design team consists of 25 people in product design, marketing, UI, branding, front-end and back-end developers, accounting for about 1000 of the company's 2.5%. There are 15 product designers, 5 interface Engineers, 5 user investigators, 4 interactive designers and a content planner.

There, designers emphasize the importance of coding, they will share the design as early as possible, from the beginning of the project until the completion of the participation, and never infatuated with their own design. Summing up, how do these designers make tens of thousands of users happy to use it? It's leaning against "being there from start to finish, share early & often, getting your hands dirty, don ' t fall in Love "These four points.

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 you have identified the visual style, start writing code to make prototypes. Designers learn how real data works in page layouts by writing code.

• Constantly balancing trade-offs by constantly iterative interaction design and visual design to make many 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, and a bottom-up design team organization. This is essential for the team to share their ideas.

• Develop tools to achieve efficient sharing. One of these tools is called Pixelcloud, similar to an online gallery with comments. 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 fixed 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 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.

• Prototypes lie. They often lack content and contextual connections. It is therefore 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 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 and 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 yesterday the head of the website changed.

• Our work is far from complete than ever before.

• A/b test for most features. Clearly define metrics for measuring effects and measure them, but don't let metrics drive design