This article is my understanding of UI design industry in 2016, as well as my plan for future ability development. There are many opinions in it that belong to my own guesses. I just share them with you and hope you can read them with judgment. Please mark the link for forwarding.
The market forces you to change
Industry status quo
Since the second half of 2016, the UI design talent market has changed:
For example, in 2015, a designer with more than two years of work experience would get about one interview out of five resumes. In the second half of 2016, 20 resumes averaged one interview.
How to understand the above phenomenon?
- The number of UI designers has been increasing year by year since 2012.
- In the winter of 2016, small and medium-sized enterprises have relatively tight funds.
- Because of global inflation, salaries are rising year by year.
- It is expected that the mobile Internet will enter a stable (recession) period from the beginning of 2017.
That is to say, small and medium-sized enterprises have less money, personnel costs have risen, and employees have become more. Competition is naturally fierce.
Industry in the future
The more people employed in an industry, the larger the market of the industry, the greater the gap between the rich and the poor of the industry.
One of the best references to the future shape of the UI design industry is the field of graphic design. There are probably a lot of UI designers who look down on graphic designers, with the understanding that most graphic designers design business cards, display shelves, and billboards in small roadside advertising shops. The average salary of such graphic designers went from 4K/ month in 2012 to 8K/ month in 2016. This is a far cry from the salary range for UI designers from 6-10K/ month in 2012 to 12K/ month -25K/ month in 2016. In fact, when computers were just popularized in China, their salary was equivalent to that of UI designers this year, and they also belonged to the middle and upper strata of the working class in society. But with the flood of this field, the number of people in the industry has increased, and there has been a huge gap between graphic designers. Good graphic designers have worked in 4A advertising agencies, and good graphic designers such as Han Jiaying, Kan Tai-keung, and Chen Youjian have become masters in this field. Their income far exceeds that of UI design directors in first-tier Internet enterprises (annual income 50W). It is easy for these graphic design masters to earn more than several hundred thousand a month. A visual designer with 7-8 years of 4A experience can also earn 30-50W/year. I expect that in the field of UI design, there will be such a group of elites in the future, the more crowded this field, the more people, the more valuable the industry elite. The premise is that the elite’s ability must be an order of magnitude different from that of the industry. To become the industry elite, the overflow of industry employees will become the “demographic dividend of the industry”, which is also the theme mentioned in this paper:
Design capability requires a qualitative change.
Learn from the Masters
My mother asked me earlier that if her generation wanted to learn a trade, they needed to find masters in the trade and learn from them. Only by learning from the masters can one become an elite in that field. The UI design industry is still very young and there are no recognized masters yet. Based on the nature of this industry, we have no way to find a master. But I think the creators of UIKit after iOS7 will be considered one of the masters. So UIKit is my idea of a master, learning from it, in line with my mother’s stated values. A good UI is more than just designing a few interfaces and formulating a few design specifications. It’s a system. Personally, I think the comprehensive design concept of UIKit for iOS is far beyond that of the current industry.
When I refer to UIKit in this article, I do not mean the development component UIKit in Cocoa in a narrow sense. It refers to the whole system from UI design to development components, which is collectively called UIKit in this article.
- Have a set of their own design concept
- There is a complete set of design specifications
- A complete set of controls
- There is a complete set of gestures
- There is a universal set of default dynamic effects
- There is a code base that developers use
What can you do with all of these?
Once a product manager has finished designing features, interaction designers must follow Apple’s design specifications. After interaction design, developers can complete the entire application development by using UIKit controls. Even interactive animations, pop-ups, animations are all designed using UIKit native. To put it simply, use “system native design” to design products. So the UI designers at Apple have already done UI design for most of the products, just this one UIKit. Objectively speaking, the job of our UI designers is essentially to replace these default system designs and make our App more “special”. Remember the graphic designer I was talking about at the little AD shop? In that sense, mediocre UI designers are just like them.
Design a UI system to achieve qualitative change
UI design capabilities fall into several stages, as I understand them (localized version) :
- You can draw any effect you want (hands-on ability)
- See others good design can steal (application ability, aesthetic ability)
- Can design some good original design (design ability, objectively speaking, this depends on the play)
- Ability to systematically design a set of design specifications (design style specification ability)
- Ability to design a complete UI system (visual design architecture, understanding of UI program implementation)
Above the first 4, I believe that some of the partners of more than 5 years of employment have reached, qualitative change is the first to reach the fifth. Let’s design uIs that are “system native.”
What should a good UI system look like? How to make it?
- Beautiful design style
- Have a design concept in place
- There is a complete set of design specifications
- A complete set of control library
- There is a universal set of default dynamic effects
- Interaction designers can use this UI system to build a variety of generic applications
Briefly explain how the UI system is used for project division.
Future division of labor based on UI systems
How far is the future? Wu Xiaobo said that the mobile Internet emerged only five years ago, and now it has passed its peak and reached the time point of industrial transformation. So how far into the future I don’t know, but it’s definitely closer than we think.
product
A front-line Internet company should have a UI system team dedicated to designing its own enterprise UI system and improving it year by year, just like ios7-ios10. Other actual project team product managers and interaction designers only need to use this UI system to build their own product form. In addition, product interaction needs to be designed within the framework specified by the UI system, so that users can have consistent experience when using different products of the enterprise (just like using iOS system). Also can save more design manpower cost. In the product design, we should discuss with the UI system team to design these extra parts within the scope of the UI system design concept, and the UI system team will optimize these parts into the UI system in the future.
operating
More human resources of design are put into operation, no matter content operation or activity operation, more and better designers are needed. Since the contents of operation are not consistent, differentiation is needed, which is exactly the essence of design. More designed operation content is used to embellish the difference of products and show a variety of fresh designs. Will make the product quality on a new level.
The UI system is a shell, and we need the most beautiful shell to hold the most beautiful jewelry.
UI systems make masters
If you are the creator of this library and design this system to reach (exceed) apple’s UIKit level. And if the product reaches a certain height, it becomes a phenomenon product in some period of time. So in the future looking back, we may say that xx, the creator of a UI system, is the contemporary master of UI design.
challenge
Luo Fat said well, is because can’t do so to make a promise in public, in order to blackmail their efforts to try. You can learn to design a UI system and share the process.
Afterword.
The above content was written in 2016. Now look at the front-end field. In addition to UIKit, Antd and other component libraries, they already have their own complete design language and UI system. It is expected that more and more enterprises will have their own Antd in the future.
If the product and design teams don’t have a good understanding of UI system concepts and don’t have a good design language throughout the project, it can lead to a lot of pain for the front-end developers and a loss of the development advantage that is now centered around componentization.