What is design? What is the design going to solve?

Design for many years, created a few times, always want to rely on the skills of the beginning to really do something. However, seen too many short-lived excellent "design" products, struggling in the market, the demise of a designer as a sense of powerlessness is more and more profound.

More than 10 years, the design of precipitation down the thing is actually very simple.

What is design? What is the design going to solve?

The first is to define a concept: broad design and narrow design. The narrow sense of design is: Do not involve the business model and strategic layer of the image layer design: icon, interactive model, and even logo,poster, I believe that most designers face the dilemma is here, the design does a good job can not affect the overall strategy.

Corresponding to this, the broad sense of innovative design refers to: from the experience and users, mining the demand point, with high quality and friendly performance layer. This is why more and more designers are turning to PM, or even starting a business, because of the rich experience from the presentation layer, you can begin to gain insight into the underlying insight. In fact, the essence of the narrow design is actually icing on the cake, rather than timely.

Innovative design On the contrary, a good narrow design can make a company, a product to a higher level. But an innovative design that captures pain points can create a new company, or even a new business model.

The first jawbone to do the electronic bracelet is the creative design (remember that it's his home or Fitbit)

Behind the other side of the homogeneous function of the ghost is to begin to spell appearance, function ...

Misfit Shine with unique experience and design, simply kill a way out.

Narrow design can promote sales or user volume, but cannot solve the business model, ethical, social, economic problems in nature. For example, in the virtual user experience industry such as app. TOP3 can be optimized by design: Pain point experience, deep user needs, design language planning, value-added services, etc. to compete for users, because at the top level we have the same quality, a good design differentiation can make No.3, become No.1.

and innovative design sometimes a function of the shaking smart design can overtake the curve, such as the foot, face Meng. This is why in recent years the user experience began to become more and more hot, find an insight can be broken. Because the fight is not only the experience layer, the performance layer. But subsequent to the lack of business model, the good visual performance may eventually become a fleeting.

If you look at the banking sector in another area:

The experience and design of China Merchants Bank is already very good for domestic banks. But because of the whole layout, business logic and so on constraints, with the state-owned big line is completely no way to compare. And ABC ... Recently because the company needs to run a card ... I don't want to go to that place again, net silver also stay in the last century ...

But can you design the bank's depositors to overtake ABC???

When you are serving an existing brand or industry, you make a feel-good design, but to change the company's business strategy and goals, it is too much, because more business logic and value involved, the idea of who will, but the hidden crisis and risk is difficult to be perceived by the designer.

Who ever heard of a very cool effect that saved a company? The value of a brand is determined by its own strategy and product, not by its own design.

Facebook is so monitors, and the design is so cool that in the end it's not going to flip.

There are a lot of brands that want to rally through the performance layer, like gap? Ning？

In the business sector has been enough success, the initiative of the hope of a breakthrough, but the hope that the brand design when some think too much, but lost the original users. Gap branding change allows all users to spit, Li Ning replacement branding lost a large number of users. Because if you just modify the presentation layer without making fundamental changes in the product structure and business model, there is basically nothing to do.

Many people will say: or many companies through the design changed the image of the brand Ah, experience ah, do better ah. But history is written by the victor, and all the success stories you see are only one out of 10,000, and countless cases have died on the beach.

More often the success of things is determined by the business strategy, which is a massive project spanning the overall planning of business, finance, society, and even climate. That's why many companies are willing to pay tens of millions of, or even billions of dollars a year, to Accenture, a strategic advisor like McKinsey.

Design does not mean everything, design is only part of the whole business community. Design can bring more value-added, in the industry homogenization seriously more need soft power industry (such as mobile phone, electronic products, APP ...) ) design can play a greater role.

Every designer will be copied, acquired, understood, thought, and created. If you want to change from a narrow sense of design to innovation design, more than focus on the design itself, need to absorb from the business, environment, finance and other aspects of knowledge.

For the design, recognize their positioning, do Your best, let it go!