30 years old, now in Beijing, has been doing design since graduation. I have been working for more than five years and have no plans to leave the design industry. Even if I no longer work as a designer one day, I will still play the role of “designer” in daily life or some extra jobs, because design has become a habit and way of thinking for me to make my life better.
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Going back to the question itself, I had a similar question when I was starting out, what is the path for a UI designer? Or what is the time limit at which you have to make the transition? At that time, many of the answers were to change careers to become product managers, so many students simply chose to become product managers, while I was still ignorant and chose the design position.
What I learned a few years later is that if you compare each new product or project to a newborn, the role of product managers and designers is more akin to that of parents and teachers. Product managers are responsible for their own products. They should “manage their children”, plan their growth goals for the “child” at different stages, and shape its better IQ and EQ by integrating various “educational resources”, so that it can go further successfully. For design “designers”, many of the projects were not created by us, but we clearly know how to build a product with a great user experience, how to make it both enjoyable and efficient to generate value, and how to establish norms and standards to make it better fit into the world. We can be language teachers, give it a brand of copywriting expression; It can also be an art teacher to help it express the form of beauty. It can also be a math teacher, assisting it to build iterative optimization logic based on experimental data.
As we design products, we are also accumulating “teaching experience” and evolving ourselves. The role of the designer is constantly being redefined as the two tracks of the app industry and design trends change. I have been fortunate to participate in this transformation and grow as a designer.
Five years is not an arbitrary period of time. Most people graduate from school in their fearless twenties. Five years will take you to a social environment where you bid farewell to the campus model of more than ten years, get rid of the immature image of maturity, and usher in the thirty in anticipation and anxiety. Whether in life or at work, this is a process from ambiguity to clarity, and it is normal to feel confused when facing the unknown.
The same is true for design. At the beginning of my career, my first project was interface adaptation in Party A’s company. At that time, I was not familiar with how the company defined user experience design, and completing interface adaptation of devices of various sizes within the specified time was my responsibility of UI design. In order to get more exposure to product design, I apply for the project of interaction design, where I can learn information architecture, interactive controls, process design and the establishment of design specifications from the perspective of interaction designer, and gain more opportunities to communicate and learn from upstream and downstream links of product and development. At the same time, I try my best to undertake the responsibility of user research, learn the methodology of user research, and further enrich my knowledge system in the field of experience design. Building customer-facing products requires us to know more about how to understand users and how to express product designs that are appropriate for them. With these comprehensive accumulation, we can become a real design “teacher”.
Without limits, you will have more room for growth. Five years won’t make you bored or bored with the job. What you see can be more opportunities for growth, a clearer understanding of where you are falling short, and excitement for new growth and challenges ahead.
From the accumulation of a simple design skills, to deepen the cognition to the products with the user, to establish design standard consciousness, to learn the delicate relationship between data and design, to form the business thinking and the whole process of experience design train of thought, can gradually through the data driven towards design management and design decisions, eventually to drive business development from the experience level. In detail, there are many stages and dimensions to design to enhance product competitiveness, and there is still a long way to go.
Five years’ understanding and definition of “UI design” largely determines how far we can go down this road. From the basic definition, UI (User Interface) refers to the Interface, which can be in the broad sense, that is, the connection between people, people and machines, people and the environment, it can be physical or virtual. UI design requires the support of multiple interdisciplinary backgrounds such as design art, human-computer interaction and computer.
No matter where you start learning UI design, understanding the body of knowledge behind it, and understanding UI and UI design, will help you build your knowledge properly. Once you realize that UI design is more than a simple matter of emulating a popular visual style or “typography” design for an online product, you’ll see more room for improvement and more than five years of learning and improvement along the way.
Domestic companies have different definitions of UI design. For example, visual designers are called GUI (Graphical User Interface) and interaction designers are called UI. Or a visual designer is UI, an interaction designer is interaction; If you don’t have a large product team, then a UI designer is called “design” (a far better term than “artist”, a popular term in the last century). However, from the beginning of the definition, we can find that interaction and vision are often separated. Although the fine division of labor will form efficient cooperation to some extent, it undoubtedly limits the development of designers’ abilities from another perspective. If you want to have full case design and output ability, and further in the level of interaction and visual design, you can accumulate more than five years.
At Airbnb and Airbnb, we were experience designers. The common part of product UI design of each platform is built by highly standardized design language system (DLS), so designers can spend more energy to think about how to create a better experience for products and participate in the process of product construction and polishing. Therefore, designers also get more space to think in a higher dimension. I believe that this trend will gradually mature in the design system of domestic companies. And at that time, a designer besides the original working category, what is the additional value? Maybe that’s what we need to keep making clear and working towards.
Whether you are a new designer who wants to have a clearer understanding of your career development and planning route, or an old designer who feels a bottleneck and a little confused after several years of work, I hope my sharing can provide you with more ideas and references.
Design source: Zhihu