How to enhance the "taste" of your product design

In today's data-driven world, if you do not want to be assimilated around, then taste should be one of the few qualities you should have. Similarly, taste should be one of the most important assets in the job for designers, product managers, developers, entrepreneurs, artists, and creative people from all walks of life.

As Barry Smith, the designer once put it, "Your talent will never go beyond your taste." The biggest challenge for those who are inherently tasteless is to improve their taste.

Rich industry experience often helps to improve your taste. For example, one would expect the food critics to provide us with a selection of the types of food that they had first-hand experience throughout the world. Unfortunately, the above examples do not help us translate our thinking and taste. Filter bubbles (which means that Internet companies adjust their services to personal details, including news and search results, so that users are trapped in a filtering bubble without information that might challenge or expand our worldview), and Our deep-rooted natural habits make it easier for people to repeatedly consume or absorb the same thing.

Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Inc. and Pixar, should be one of the world's most iconic designers of the last century. In an interview with foreign media "Wired", he said:

Creativity is actually a kind of ability to connect things. When you ask a very creative person how they do things, maybe they will feel guilty because they do not actually do something and they just anticipate something in advance. After a while, something seemed to them an obvious fact for them. This is because they can connect their own experience and integrate into something completely new. The reason why they can do this is because their experience is richer and they think more about their experiences than others.

Unfortunately, for the general public, there are very few creative people. In many industries, most people do not have a rich and varied experience. Moreover, they do not have enough "points," so they can not be grouped together. Not only that, but they do not have a broad view of the problem and all they can afford are often single and linear solutions. The richer a person's life experience, the wider understanding of the industry, they will do a better design.

Jobs believes that the entire life experience should be more extensive. However, as the author seems to think it is a bit silly to put all the experience together, I am more willing to explore a specific area, of course, this area must be able to help their own spiritual taste, like Some food critics who focus on the texture and taste of food, so you can improve your taste with a few specific types of media:

What kind of media you choose to read means what kind of person you will become

Telepathy, of course, when you do not think about it, telepathy will be more interesting. People have been debating whether there is telepathy for many years, and people like JBRhine have been working hard to establish an effective experimental process and hopefully prove that there is no telepathy. But telepathy has always existed, just as it did in the short story Stolen Letter written by American writer Edouard Allen Poe.

- Stephen King, "Writing - My Writing Career" (On Writing)

Really hard to ignore writing and reading. Writing is one of the most basic components of the Internet, and reading is the most important means of secondary learning. Through writing and reading, we can understand our own present, review the past, and look to the future.

A person who has a wealth of experience in writing and reading can help us to connect some unusual points of our lives together, which will make us more creative (and, in this case, the author excuses himself to insert a word, Innovative.)

We should think of reading as listening to a speech or as a dialogue with the author, all of which have only one purpose, namely, access to information. It is useful to gain different types of experiences and thoughts of others through reading to improve one's taste.

Reading is also an important way for us to look at the world. Books are like a lens for looking at life. Charlie Hoehn, a marketer and writer, writes: "My anxiety symptoms were relieved in less than two weeks after I decided not to focus on the boring news of my life and concentrate on reading a lot of."

Reading can help people improve perceptible taste, but we do not have much time to properly screen and think, but writer Alain de Botton is a good summary of reading, he wrote:

Chef: People who make food for those who are busy and have no time to prepare food. Writers: Those who explain ideas to those who are serious and can not accurately express

Product management quality

I remember when Steve Jobs was living in Woodside, California, and I was a neighbor, he did not have any furniture at home. At that time, I was very surprised, because in the world of Jobs, he did not think a piece of furniture design is good, all the furniture on the market, Steve jobs are disdain. Steve Jobs in pursuit of perfection, he would rather not have any furniture ... ... This is perhaps the biggest difference between Jobs and I, as long as there is a good life, I am willing to live in such a world; and Jobs can not, in his eyes As long as things are not good enough, he can not stand it.

- Larry Ellison Oracle Co-Founder and CEO wrote on Quora.

Good taste does not always produce the most pleasing results every time; in fact, good taste is the constant pursuit of perfection, which is a goal that is difficult to achieve, and can even be said, never achieved. The best product managers know this, so they can strike a balance between perfection and "real product," while Jobs himself prefers to refer to the actual product as "the actual deliverable artwork"

So, how do you improve your taste when designing your product? Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator Business Incubator, writes:

As with any other job, you are sure to get better and better in this area as you continue to do design work. Your taste will change. And, everyone knows they'll get better at work, and you'll know they'll get better and better. If you understand this, then with the growth of work experience, for those past grades, in addition to understanding will produce discrepancies, maybe will feel very bad, this may be the so-called self-evident reason.

Whether through external validation or internal intuition, simply gaining more experience in product development will help improve your taste, you can work wholeheartedly, communicate with people, and even You can start from a few nonessential projects and gradually gain project experience.

For those who want to improve their tastes as quickly as possible, Facebook product design director Julie Zhuo wrote:

1. For those who do the right thing or work, to give the right arrangements, work to be completed in order of priority, it is very important: for those who can see or optimize the improvement work, unless everyone on the product features and No opinion on the process, otherwise do not make any criticism.

2. Pay special attention to your work: "No matter what, as a designer, first of all, it should pay more attention to their work than others, and designers should know it well."

3. When criticizing, if you want to improve, you should use more good-faith advice: If you can not provide alternatives or suggestions when improving your product, it is actually not helpful .

Keep standards high: Even the most successful App, you have to find ways to improve and improve, when you do not bow on hand, it does not matter, more preparation of some sticks is not bad.

In developing a new App, in addition to having the possible feature sets and processes, some expert feedback can validate your ideas, all of which can help improve your taste.

People and education

Taste is obtained in communication with other people. It is because through continuous practice, you can have your own taste. If other people also have a perfect product development grade, and you can work with it, then really is a very lucky thing. If you start from scratch, then when you communicate with people, do not claim to have been satisfied, because it is too silly to do so, and if it is not your true character, but you are pretentious However, it is even more disgusting. Some even think that God's creation of another world or other perfection is merely to satisfy their own extravagant imagination.

-Baltasar Gracian, author and philosopher

Jim Rohn, an entrepreneur and author at the same time, writes: "I wanted to know how many pounds I had, so I decided to look at the longest time you spent with any of the five people and pick the five people Out, you are most like the one among the five. "

In communicating with others and improving your taste, you need a change in attitude, that is, you are treating yourself as a passionate and motivated student while others are yours teacher.

David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at Basecamp, a cloud services project management software company, wrote about improving product development. "Expanding your horizons and improving your taste requires more than just determination, but dedication , But it is absolutely possible to achieve this.People may have a certain proactive, but as long as you are willing to put yourself down, consider yourself as a student, then certainly can make their own taste Upgrade. "

In an interview with the Miami Design Conference, Pharrell Williams, an award-winning musician, designer and artist, told Kanye West, a famous American rapper, recording producer and writer, "To be honest, Get together with those of the highest caliber, and do not be afraid to learn from them, and you should never give anyone a sense of everything, and this is one of the best lessons I've learned. "

Steve Jobs himself has mastered many important learning experiences, one of which he attributed to education. "When I was formal schooling, I learned serifs and sans serifs, learned how to change the spacing between different font combinations, and learned how to make pretty typography. These fonts are beautiful and some have The sense of history is like subtle art, a feeling that science can never capture, and I find it so fascinating. "

The first step in getting education is to start looking for teachers in your area. Although there are some big truths that you can learn from anyone, note that not everyone is qualified to be called a teacher in the special area in which you live.

If you do not know who these teachers are, take a look at the best-known companies in the industry and find out who the designers or product managers who lead these companies are. I often tag some commercial publications because these magazines tend to visit the best people in a particular field and I dig deeper if their interview subject is of interest to me. In addition, if you are in a business that has award-winning businesses or the best top 10 companies, the leaders of those companies can become your teacher.

If you do not get the chance to meet industry experts, you can read their blog post or related interviews, and of course you can focus on their social media so you can understand what they think. You have to start by understanding their values ​​and judging how they think about products, designs, and start-ups, and you have to understand what's the difference between your current taste and expert values.

We can think of knowledge as food. The teacher can make any type of food. The quality of food may or may not be good, depending on the ability of the teacher. However, what foods we choose to eat is based on our taste (taste). What we ultimately absorb in the body depends on our digestive ability. So what we can learn depends very much on what the teacher can teach you and what you can absorb on your own.

-Devdutt Pattanaik, PhD, The ability to digest

Conclusion

The so-called grade, in fact, is a very valuable ability to develop. In fact, in any industry, taste is one of the essential factors for success. You should have a competency that gives you an idea of ​​what you should crave and how to prioritize things, a power that will make things clearer and help you focus more.

Please remember, the so-called what to eat, what should you eat? First you have to read more and more books, and then to judge and digest their own products, and finally, to understand that in their own industry In the field, you can always learn more from experts.

Source: Fast carp