As we all know, we have been insisting on sharing some basic content for a long time. Those knowledge points that are difficult to understand systematically through reading and sharing are closely related to my personal obsession with basic skills.
But now, there are more and more students in the background message, want to see some more advanced, more in-depth knowledge, to deal with the increasingly high professional requirements after entering the line.
Therefore, I am going to start a new series to organize and export advanced concepts and knowledge in the field of UI design.
Elementary and advanced distinction analysis
Yiliusheji.com suggests that many UI designers who are new to the industry have been working in a harsh or monotonous environment, and after a year or two of practice feel that they are still in the same place without making any progress.
And not only does the past experience feel like it can’t be accumulated, but it will continue for the foreseeable future, wasting your youth? This is causing our anxiety to continue to ferment.
At this time, it is necessary to examine where the future way out, how I should improve myself, how to master the method of progress, into a better platform.
This is where the biggest problem arises. Most people have a very vague concept of progression, and just regard everything that improves your current skill level as progression, which will have a very negative impact on your learning path and planning.
So we’re going to have to be a little bit more specific to understand what advanced knowledge is.
As you gain some work experience and interview experience, you should find that the people who approve your design become more and more concerned with the question, “Why do you design like that?” .
The answer to this question determines the level of a designer. For junior designers, the answer will focus on visual concepts, subjective preferences. Advanced designers, on the other hand, will solve the problem through more methodology, objective analysis and experience summary.
For advanced design, the proportion of visual performance in the career development has declined, except for a tool person who listens to the needs of output design, to become a mature designer with independent thinking ability and execution ability.
To sum up, in addition to basic design skills, advanced designers need to have:
Ability to understand and analyze main business and requirements
Ability to correctly understand the user’s methods to influence product decisions
Work seamlessly with other team members
Get behind the details, why it’s important, and be personal — you need to be able to bring more revenue to the organization, and that revenue includes improving the product experience and adding data to the product in your work!
As a junior designer, your problem is how to meet the needs of your superiors. You already have instructions on what to design and what to make. You just have to focus on making the design that satisfies them.
At a higher level, however, the designer’s job is no longer so simple. Design is part of the experience and plays a key role in the growth of the product. A mature team will carefully consider this aspect. Therefore, the ball should be kicked to the designer: what kind of demand A should be made this time to ensure the maximization of product benefits?
There’s no one to tell the designer what to do, and it’s obviously amateurish to play off your own preferences. UI design is a business, and you need to be professional, objective, and logical. You need to come up with a solution to a problem in a convincing way.
Therefore, the team of big factory is happy to invent all kinds of professional theories and design processes, in order to make the output design more reliable and more valuable.
And that’s what advanced UI designers and junior designers in the industry are currently judged by…
Advanced KNOWLEDGE of UI design
Advanced should master what knowledge point, not on the net to find a pile of secret dense knowledge point map or chart is enough. Forget about the concept, focus on what they do.
In a professional dACHang design team, a complete project process that designers need to go through can be roughly broken down into three stages: preliminary preparation, execution and output, and follow-up review.
Different sharing and internal arrangement of the company will make this process very complicated. I am afraid that others will think that you are not professional enough and that you do not know enough, which will cause a special headache for beginners after reading it. So, let’s respectively introduce what should be done in the three stages and what knowledge points are generally included.
Step 1: Prepare
At the beginning of each project, the designer should not rush to do the design directly, but prepare the “design proposal” first.
The first step in the design is to understand the requirements of the project. Although the product manager will explain this once in the requirements meeting, it is not enough to just listen to this. We need to “translate” these requirements into something that we can understand and fit into the design work.
After that, we need to make further preparation plans according to the content of the requirements. You can build user portraits, emotional boards, empathy maps, or obtain more effective information through some qualitative or quantitative research programs to help us establish a global vision.
Then, based on the obtained information, the concept of the subsequent design is developed to correspond to the advantages and disadvantages of the previously obtained information.
Simplified into a definite question sentence pattern, roughly:
I need to do a requirement X today
Considering the survey results A
It also relates to B
We’re also talking about the statistical result C
So here’s what I’m going to do…
In MBA logic, this definite object sentence pattern is the embodiment of “deductive method”, and our job is to obtain materials that can advance logical deduction.
This step is also the most important embodiment of the value of advanced designers. There are thousands of methods of research and analysis. Although it is not difficult to master each one, it requires experience and sufficient thinking to choose which ones to apply and how to make plans and implement them in a real project.
Step 2: Execute the output
At this point, I believe that I do not need to do too much introduction, complete the prototype, specification, visual, dynamic output.
In some special projects, the finalization of the design is not necessarily an internal decision, but may be evaluated through certain usability tests, or the establishment of grayscale tests or AB tests.
Attention should be paid to the completed design content, not only to meet the user experience requirements, but also to comply with the plan formulated in the previous step.
If one set of analysis and one set of design does not match, then the previous work is lost value, or you have some mistakes in the process, need to be checked.
Step 3: Review the aftermath
This step is to start collaborating with other project members to facilitate the implementation of the design. In addition to the basic annotation cutting map art ability, but also to do, is to begin to review the gains and losses of the project process, convenient after improvement.
Moreover, for teams that care more about data and KPI assessment, designers should also formulate ways to quantify the effect of design schemes, and check the effectiveness of schemes by collecting data or user feedback.
This collected information, accumulated over each iteration of the project, helps the team move into a more efficient and better functioning state. And help products in a scientific design process to achieve steady iteration and growth.
The skills needed to advance the UI are the work that needs to be performed in the different parts of the process. The more you know about the professional design process, the clearer you can be about what you need to learn.
conclusion
I don’t know how much you can absorb from the above analysis. In the past two years, there have been voices emphasizing experience and advancement, but in any case, there is a sequence of hearing tao.
You first need to master the basic skills and norms before pursuing concepts and knowledge of advanced domains. You have to learn how to write before you start learning the art of writing.
One last thought, from the perspective of someone who has been there before, is that the industry is starting to put more emphasis on theory, not least because the upper and lower limits of the hard skills of UI design (visual presentation) are too low to be compared to the visual and 3D fields.
It is not only UI that needs to be analyzed. Any commercial activity needs to be analyzed. For brand, creativity, interior and industrial design, there is only so much content to be analyzed and conceptual.
But the visuals of these design industries include very high ceilings, and the best designers often have amazing design expressiveness that makes us lose sight of the thinking and ideas behind them.
First-class design network hints that THE UI industry benefits from the bonus of the Internet, and gains more substantial benefits on the basis of lower difficulty. Practitioners should rationalize this status quo. The increasing number of theories, frameworks, models and abbreviations each year are all efforts to improve their status.
How much of this effort actually generates growth, and how much is an arm for upward management in the workplace, will be up to you to decide for yourself…