How the Product manager works with the designers

Working with professional designers, it is found that working with designers requires special consideration in order to produce amazing creations compared to roles like customers and programmers. Here are some ideas for your reference.

Design is more than just an interface

The product manager needs to know clearly that design is more than just an interface. Many people use designers as art artists, and this only calls to a very small part of the designer's intellectual resources, or just as a skilled user of Photoshop. The designers who really love design and art are very young and begin to learn painting. The same life twenty or thirty years, in theory, he (she) understanding of life and understand more than ordinary people. However, either forced to live, or the boss, their design will be compromised, once the compromise becomes a habit, they will show "work design" and "like Design" two different design feelings.

The product manager has the ability to visualize the future (if you are not copying it), but it is the designer himself who designs the vision. As a result, product managers can ensure that the design feels consistent only when they think of the designer as an extension of their brains. Interface design is simple, but color, text, proportion, emphasis, feeling, and so on, these nondescript but vital details, only to produce a sympathetic design resonance to ensure that the design pass the same. Here is a typical conversation:

Me: "I want to be able to convey a feeling of warmth, freedom, simplicity." Don't be too complicated, but don't be too empty. ”

Designer: "So you're going to use some yellow and orange shades, OK?"

Me: "Do not adhere to a certain color, good design should be a combination of"

Designer: "Well, I'll do it."

The first version of the design, has been big Bird over the dark blue background, the golden sunlight across the blue, the light will be the bird's wings dyed bright.

"Look good, but a little repressed. "I said.

"That's white?" The designer asked.

“...... What do you mean, white? I'm a little dizzy.

The next version is out. White background.

"The interface seems too loose. Feel no passion. " I frown.

"So, I'm a little more compact?"

............

These dialogues are often essential in the early stages of cooperation. But I feel totally wrong. Design should be a very subjective feeling. It seems that the color is wrong--changed the color and found that typesetting is not--changed the layout after found that the illustration of the brush strokes seem too rough-after the change to find the overall sense of the direction of their expectations seems to have many deviations.

If you look at the work of a domestic designer, you will find that in most cases their personal work is more spiritually than they are in business. I guess it's mostly about taking care of the average customer, or the customer is impatient and unwilling to share their business vision with the designer so they can really understand.

In fact, the solution is also very simple. This is hardly a problem for small teams-helping designers understand the customer's problems, understanding the user's pain point from a product level, and creating empathy and agreeing on a product vision. Product managers need to have the psychological expectation that they need to spend enough time communicating with their designers.

Beyond interest to design with compassion

Good programmers have a sense of code and want to write code that is simple, beautiful, and unique. Good designers also seem to be the same. They try to add their own preference to design elements, reflect their personality and aesthetic tendencies. such as small rounded corners, bright dark edges, almost fine shadows and so on. They also seem to be able to redraw some elements of the interface sufficiently, or to differentiate some design elements. As a page as a whole, it looks good in a static review, but as a product that needs to interact with the user, sometimes the color, size, placement, and user focus are the UX's deliberate behavior. From a static point of view may not be perfect, but users in the use of time, attention protection and guidance is more important.

Designers usually pay attention to detail, and some details can consume quite a bit of time and effort. These details are not that important from the standpoint of product use. But persuading designers to give up these details sometimes seems hard. They will feel frustrated, like pulling up the bow and pointing to the bull's-eye, and others say you've got it wrong.

But the design is definitely not for the sake of being different. The great design is usually the artistic result that the designer passes through the difficult self-doubt, the negation, the torment final sublimation. If you look at the classic paintings that are still enduring today, think about the author's times and their lives, and you'll get the conclusion. Always understand the public, stay in the minority, to respect the public as the starting point, so as to produce a full of humanistic feelings rather than unconventional design. The pursuit of their own interest is not wrong, but the self-doubt of the negative after the torture produced by the warm design of compassion, more can inspire people.

It's hard to make these conversations with designers. But the embodiment of designer personality never produces group behavior. Some bizarre mobile phones (such as the buttons on both sides of the phone's Siemens SX1, the Moto Mobile phone) are not even the company. To promote the aesthetic of the masses, pandering is very vulgar, understand them, ignore their preferred design symbols, with compassion to design, more can produce great design.

Design is the product of designer sentiment.

If you often eat in a restaurant with the same cook's meal, you can probably tell the cook's mood by the taste of the meal. Design is a more subjective, private and emotional process product. Professional training can solve the day-to-day tasks: such as button change size, change color, and so on. But to solve the problems of inspiration and creative design, designers can only produce them in a certain state. If the designer is repressed and restrained, then the design that is produced will be hard to come by.

The week before the line was easy to go online, I was always dissatisfied with the design of the main site. After the communication with the designer, a holiday day. The next day after the logo design, is a full of modern sense, full of light and light effect of the colorful hot air balloon, the balloon has a city silhouette. The whole logo looks stylish and full of pleasure, not tired of watching. One day after the main station all the design came out. I'm not sure how it will be without a break, but it's clear that continuing to suffocate in the office is unlikely to produce a better idea.

Some other

If the designer says you're not ready, don't bother them. Designers often do things like this: Create ideas first, paint on paper or on a drawing board for a while, then compose, place elements, then make preliminary designs; Until the final details are designed, the middle process is basically less animations. Just like the last point of the finishing touches, the final detail has a different effect on the sense of design. When the designers say they are not ready, do not disturb them, let them quietly to finish the design.

If the design is wrong, do not put the dialogue to the level of red, blue. Share with them the problems you want to solve, arouse the designer's empathy, stand on the user's point of view to design;

In order to communicate with designers, their own aesthetic needs to improve. Aesthetics is an index that cannot be quantified. In addition to the comparative academic grid theory, color theory, typesetting, typography, more optimistic about the design (dribbble there are many), usually pay more attention to your favorite design, analysis of the reasons for love. I am sure that it is a painful thing for designers to communicate with people who are not aesthetically attractive. Don't let this pain happen between you.